Four months before, in the same situation, had I seen Textiles stagger as they staggered in the first hour of business on the Stock Exchange that morning, I'd have sounded the charge, clapped spurs to my charger, and borne down upon them. But--I had my new-born yearning for “respectability”; I had my new-born squeamishness, which led me to fear risking Bob Corey and his bank and the money of my old friend Healey; finally, there was Anita--the longing for her that made me prefer a narrow and uncertain foothold to the bold leap that would land me either in wealth and power or in the bottomless abyss. Instead of continuing to sell Textiles, I covered as far as I could; and I bought so eagerly and so heavily that, more than Langdon's corps of rocketers, I was responsible for the stock's rally and start upward. When I say “eagerly” and “heavily,” I do not mean that I acted openly or without regard to common sense. I mean simply that I made no attempt to back up my followers in the selling campaign I had urged them into; on the contrary, I bought as they sold. That does not sound well, and it is no better than it sounds. I shall not dispute with any one who finds this action of mine a betrayal of my clients to save myself. All I shall say is that it was business, that in such extreme and dire compulsion as was mine, it was--and is--right under the code, the private and real Wall Street code. You can imagine the confused mass of transactions in which I was involved before the Stock Exchange had been open long. There was the stock we had been able to buy or get options on at various prices, between the closing of the Exchange the previous day and that morning's opening--stock from all parts of this country and in England. There was the stock I had been buying since the Exchange opened--buying at figures ranging from one-eighth above last night's closing price to fourteen points above it. And, on the debit side, there were the “short” transactions extending over a period of nearly two months--“sellings” of blocks large and small at a hundred different prices. An inextricable tangle, you will say, one it would be impossible for a man to unravel quickly and in the frantic chaos of a wild Stock Exchange day. Yet the influence of the mysterious state of my nerves, which I have described above, was so marvelous that, incredible though it seems, the moment the Exchange closed, I knew exactly, where I stood. Like a mechanical lightning calculator, my mind threw up before me the net result of these selling and buying transactions. Textile Common closed eighteen points above the closing quotation of the previous day; if Langdon's brother had not been just a little indiscreet, I should have been as hopeless a bankrupt in reputation and in fortune as ever was ripped up by the bulls of Wall Street.