She frowned. “Don’t talk business, please,” she said. “You know we never have in all our married life. You’ve always respected my position as your wife. All business is low--is mere sordidness.” “Yes, it’s all low,” said I. “Sometimes I think all living is low as well. Edna”--I put my arm round her--“don’t you ever feel that we’d be _really_ happy, that we’d get something genuine out of life--if you and Margot and I----” She stopped my mouth with a kiss. “You never will grow up to your station, darling.” I said no more. Indeed, it was on hastiest impulse that I had said so much, an impulse sprung from a mood of depression. The cause of that mood was a nasty reverse in Wall Street. It had rudely halted me in my triumphant way toward the security of the man of many millions. It had set me to wavering uncertainly, with the chances about even for resuming the march and for tumbling into the abyss of a discreditable bankruptcy. There are in New York two well-defined classes of the rich--the permanently rich and the precariously rich. The permanently rich are those who by the vastness of their wealth or by the strength of their business and social connections cannot possibly be dislodged from the plutocracy. The precariously rich are those who have much money and are making more, but are not strong enough to survive a series of typhoons, and are without the support of indissoluble business and social connections. My friend G----, for example, head of the famous banking house, associated in business and by marriage with half the permanent plutocracy, was practically bankrupt in the late panic. Had he been a man of ordinary position he would have gone into bankruptcy, and, I more than suspect, into jail. But his fellow plutocrats dared not let him drop, much as they would have liked to see his arrogance brought low, much as they longed to divide among themselves his holdings of gilt-edged securities; if he had gone down it would have made the whole financial world tremble. He was saved. On the other hand, my friend J----, richer actually, was ruined, was plucked by his associates, was finally jailed for doing precisely the things every man of finance did over and over again in that same period of stress--for, what invariably happens to moral codes in periods of stress?