The Ashton Welles who finished reading the beastly paragraphs of _Society Folk_ was not the same Ashton Welles who began them. He was no longer an efficient financier, but a man benumbed, whose brain had turned to plaster of Paris. His mind at once lost all elasticity, all power to functionate. And, since he could not think, he could not act. That wonderful world, which financially successful people create for themselves with so much pride, tumbled about his ears. Out of the chaos made by a few printed words, only one thing was certain--he suffered! Men are always wounded in a vital spot when they are wounded by jealousy, and Ashton Welles was particularly vulnerable because he lived in only two places--his office and his home. He did not have other houses of refuge to which his soul could retreat--like music or literature or art--in case of need. He had been so busy winning success that he had not had time for anything else. He had worked for the aggrandizement of the personal fortune of Ashton Welles. When circumstances and that reputation for luck, shrewdness, and caution, which is in itself a golden sagacity, finally placed him, still a young man, at the head of the VanTwiller Trust Company, David Soulett, one of the directors, remarked: “Welles has married the company; but we don't yet know whether he is to be the company's husband or whether the company is to be his wife!” And a fellow-director, who had been in profitable deals with Welles, retorted, “Well, I call it an ideal match!” Welles brought to the company what it needed and the presidency brought to Welles many opportunities--none of which he neglected. He saw the deposits increase tenfold--and his own fortune twentyfold. What might not have been politic in an individual playing a lone hand was altogether admirable in the head of a financial institution--his cold-bloodedness, for example, and the dehumanized attitude toward life habitually assumed by the principal cog-wheel in that intricate aggregation of cog-wheels known as a modern trust company. Being an excellent money-lender, he was an uninteresting human being. You lose much when you win money--for gold is hard and cold, and the enjoyment of life calls for softness and warmth. It is the appalling revenge capital takes on its self-called masters.