“You never asked me,” she said, thoughtfully, as reviewing a state of facts. “You only said you wanted to marry me.” I construed it as a challenge. No, that is as I think of it now. What happened to me then was beyond any process of thought. It occurred outside of me, if that means anything. There was a sense of dissolving. Objects, ideas, place, planes, dimensions, my own egoistic importance, all seemed to dissolve in one significant sensation. There is a recollection that at this moment something became extremely vivid. What it was that became vivid I do not know. The word that comprehends without defining it is completion. In the whole world there was nothing else of consequence or meaning. “I ask you now,” I said. I heard my own words from afar. They were uttered by someone who had been sitting where I sat and for all I knew or cared might be sitting there still. _I_ was a body moving through space, with a single anxiety, which was to meet another body in space for a purpose I could not stop to examine. I remember thinking, “I may. I may. The bargain is cancelled.” She leaped to her feet, evading me, and laughed with her head tossed back,--an icy, brilliant laugh that made me rigid. I could not interpret it. I do not know yet what it meant. Nor do I comprehend the astonishing gesture that followed. Slowly she moved to the African idol, picked it up, brought it to the mantel under a strong light and began to examine it carefully. She explored every plane of its surface and became apparently quite lost in contemplation of its hideous beauty. Holding it at arm’s length and still looking at it she spoke. “Lord Porteous thinks it very ugly?” “So he said,” I replied. “He may be right,” she said. “Perhaps it is. So many things turn ugly when you look at them closely ... friendship even.” Then she dropped it. As it crashed on the hearthstone she turned, without a glance at the fragments or at me, and walked out of the room. Three days later her engagement to Lord Porteous was announced. CHAPTER XIII SUCCESS i The ready explanation of Galt’s rise in a few years to the rôle of Wall Street monarch is that he was a master profit maker. The way of it was phenomenal. His touch was that of genius, daring, unaccountable, mysteriously guided by an inner mentality. And when the results appeared they were so natural, inevitable, that men wondered no less at their own stupidity than at his prescience. Why had they not seen the same opportunity? His associates made money by no effort of their own. They had only to put their talents with the mighty steward. He took them, employed them as he pleased, and presently returned them two-fold, five-fold, sometimes twenty-fold.