Robert Streightley had done all this by his own talent and exertion--"on his own hook," as the Stock Exchange men phrased it. The keenness of his business intellect was astounding. He seemed to sift a proposition as it was being laid before him; and as soon as the proposer ceased speaking, Robert Streightley closed with or pooh-poohed the offer, with incontrovertible reasons for his decision. He spoke out plainly and boldly before the oldest and the youngest who sought his advice; he was neither deferential nor patronising; and never sought to please--simply for the sake of pleasing--any of his clients. The young men looked up to him in wonder, and spoke of him over mid-day chops and sherry as a "cool card," a "long-headed chap," "just about one," and in other complimentary slangisms. The older men scarcely knew what to make of him; they hated him for his daring and success, for the dashing manner in which he was passing them all in the race for wealth and distinction; and they would have well liked to have shrugged their shoulders and hinted about his being "fast," and "going ahead," and finally making a grand smash of it; but they had no pretext. So long as Robert Streightley's business relations were thoroughly sound and wholesome it would have been against that _esprit de corps_ which largely prevails among City men to breathe a word against him; and as for his private life, they could scarcely bring a charge of reckless extravagance against a man who went home to a seventy-pound-a-year house at Brixton in the "Paragon" omnibus, and there indulged in the dissipation of a "meat-tea" in the society of his mother and sister. So they found another vent for their spleen, and talked of him as a "doosid close-fisted fellow," a "mean narrow-minded hunks," and a "niggardly screw." He merited none of these appellations. He was a straightforward, honourable business-man, bred in a narrow circle, which his own innate business habits were narrowing year by year. As a boy he had had instilled into him the value of money and the secret of money-getting; as a young man the whole scope of his faculties had been directed to this end. Such little fancy as he possessed--and with such a father the smallness of that fancy could be easily divined--had been ruthlessly eradicated, and all the nascent tendencies of his mind had been directed into one strong channel of fact. That Jack had ever found giants to slay, that glass slippers were ever worn by cinder-wenches, or pumpkins could by any possibility become carriages, were fictions not to be found in Bonnycastle and ignored by Walkinghame; but that two and two made four, or that a talent of silver hid in a napkin remained an unproductive talent of silver, whereas a hundred pounds invested in Consols produced yearly three pounds as interest to its holder, were as demonstrable as the light and heat of the sun at noonday.