The family bank, after languishing along for a liberal time under its receiver, had been wound up, and the stockholders, among whom he was a large one but far from the largest, accepted the results and turned wry faces to new prospects elsewhere. The family holdings of real-estate, on the edge of the central district rather than in it, did not share the general and almost automatic advance in values, and an uncertain, slow-moving scheme for a general public improvement--one that continually promised to eventuate yet continually held off--had kept one of his warehouses vacant for years: its only income was contributed by an advertising company, which utilized part of its front as a bulletin-board. Rents in this quarter kept down, though taxes--more through rising rates than increased valuations--went up. And those two big old houses! Raymond still lived, too expensively in one, and paid interest on a cumbering old mortgage. The other--old Jehiel's--was rented, at no great advantage, to a kind of correspondence school which conducted dubious courses and was precarious pay. In such circumstances Raymond began to lend an ear to offers of "real-estate trades" and to suggestions for reinvestments. But real-estate, in which almost everybody had once dabbled (with advantage assumed and usually realized), had now become a game for experts. Profits for the few: disaster--or at least disillusionment--for the many. Raymond thought he could "exchange" to advantage, and the bright young men (who knew what they were about much better than he did) flocked to help him. Well, one man in a hundred exchanges with profit; the ninety-and-nine, the further they go the more they lose--onions peeled coat by coat. Thus Raymond, until I heard of some of his operations and tried to stop them. One frank-faced, impudent young chap, who thought he was secure in a contract, I had to frighten off; but others had preceded him. Investments were offered him too: schemes in town, and schemes--bolder and more numerous--out of town. Some of these had the support of McComas and his "crowd," and turned out advantageously enough, for those on the "inside"--to continue the jargon of the day and its interests; but Raymond sensitively, even fastidiously, stepped away from these, and trusted himself, rather, to financial free lances who often were not only without principle, but also without definite foothold. "If you would only consult me!" more than once I had occasion to remonstrate. "Who are these people? What organization have they got--what responsibility?" But though he would dicker with strangers, who took hours of his time with their specious palaverings, he shrank more and more from his own tenants and his own agents. One rather important lease had to be renewed over his head--or behind his back. Still, I do not know that, on this particular occasion, his interests greatly suffered.