In this year of our Lord, 1911, Grove was a brilliantly successful young man in a city where success was most completely estimated by the noise a man and his money made. Grove was as well satisfied with himself as any young man could be whose career was assuming meteoric aspects. Everything he touched turned out well. The Norquay Trust Company seemed to exercise a hypnotic drawing power over investors with loose funds. There was a speculative movement in land rising to a climax in Vancouver, a something that was to assume gigantic proportions in the following eighteen months. Already shoe clerks were beginning to go without lunch to make payments on plots of land in distant suburbs, and to go about their duties dreaming of the quick turn-over and the long profit. All of which, when it occurs in a seaport in conjunction with the building of two transcontinental railway terminals, an expansion of shipping, an upturn in mining and timber, breeds that phenomenon of Western America, the "boom." Great is the confidence of the participants,--and the entire community participates. For the time being it is forgotten that whatever goes up must come down. It is a great game while it lasts. Better than draw poker. Better than playing the ponies. It is legitimate, respectable, as well as thrilling. It isn't gambling. It isn't even speculation. It is investment. Of course a trust company with a well-defined and legally restricted field of operations was not actively participating in this frenetic exchange of land titles, notes, mortgages, options and hand-to-hand agreements of sale. But the rapidity and number of such transactions created a business which Grove's company absorbed so thriftily that its growth shamed the furious beanstalk. The Norquay Trust occupied the first two floors of a new building named after itself, on the roof of which rose a steel skeleton covered with incandescent bulbs, the sign Rod had marked on his return.