"Well, they can’t in copper. The Pool means that a bunch of financiers have put up millions to corner the copper market and skyrocket the price." "Oh, he lost all his money in it and got desperate and jumped out." "Um—from the hall window in the Black Eagle Building." That made it come nearer, the way things do when someone you know is on the ground. "Why that’s where Iola Barry works—in Miss Whitehall’s office on the seventeenth floor." Babbitts’ eyes shifted from the paper to his loving spouse: "That’s so. I’d forgotten it. Just one story below. I wonder if Iola was there." "I guess not, she goes home at six. It’s a good thing she wasn’t. She’s a hysterical, timid little rat. Being round when a thing like that happened would have broke her up more than a spell of sickness." Iola Barry was a chum of mine. Four years ago, before I was transferred to New Jersey, we’d been girls together in the same exchange, and though I didn’t see much of her when I was Central in Longwood, since I’d come back we’d met up and renewed the old friendship. Having the fatality happen so close to her fanned my interest considerable and I reached across and picked up one of the papers. The first thing my eye lit on was a picture of Hollings Harland—a fine looking, smooth-shaven man. When I saw the two long columns about him I realized what an important person he was and why Babbitts was so mad he’d missed the detail. Besides his own picture there was one of his house—an elegant residence on Riverside Drive, full of pictures and statuary, and a library he’d taken years to collect. Then there was all about him and his life. He was forty-six years of age and though small in stature, a fine physical specimen, never showing, no matter how hard he worked, a sign of nerves or weariness. In his boyhood he’d come from a town up state, and risen from the bottom to the top, "cleaving his way up," the paper had it, "by his brilliant mind, indomitable will and tireless energy." Three years before, his wife had died and since then he’d retired from society, devoting himself entirely to business. Toward the end of the article came a lot of stuff about the Copper Pool, and the names of the other men in it—he seemed to be in it too. There was only one of these I’d ever heard of—Johnston Barker—which didn’t prove that I knew much, as everybody had heard of him. He was one of the big figures of finance, millionaire, magnate, plutocrat, the kind that one paper calls, "A malefactor of great wealth," and its rival, "One of our most distinguished and public-spirited citizens." That places him better than a font of type. He was in the Copper Pool up to his neck—the head of it as far as I could make out. I had just got through with that part—it wasn’t interesting—and was reading what had happened before the suicide when Babbitts spoke: "Harland seems to have had a scene in his office with Johnston Barker in the afternoon." I looked up from my sheet and said: