He bowed with a pompous manner, and stood twirling the chain of his eye-glasses. "Yes, yes, I have heard of your brother. His name is well known already," he answered. "I congratulate, sir," he added, "not the 'man who got rich quickly,' as I've heard you called, but the fortunate brother of a beautiful sister." "What a perfectly horrid old man," remarked Sally, some minutes later, as we drove back again. "I think, Ben, we'll have to take the little sister. She's a beauty." "If she wasn't so everlastingly cold and quiet." "It suits her style--that little precise way she has. There's a look about her like one of Perugino's saints." Then the carriage stopped at the office, and I returned, with a high heart, to the game. CHAPTER XXI I AM THE WONDER OF THE HOUR During the first year of my marriage I was already spoken of as the most successful speculator in the state. The whirlpool of finance had won me from the road, and I had sacrificed the single allegiance to the bolder moves of the game. Yet if I could be bold, I was cautious, too,--and that peculiar quality which the General called "financial genius," and the world named "the luck of the speculator," had enabled me to act always between the two dangerous extremes of timidity and rashness. "To get up when others sat down, and to sit down when others got up," I told the General one day, had been the rule by which I had played. "They were talking of you at the club last night, Ben," he said. "You were the only one of us who had sense enough to load up with A. P. & C. stock when it was selling at 80, and now it's jumped up to 150. Jim Randolph was fool enough to remark that you'd had the easiest success of any man he knew." "Easy? Does he think so?" "So you call that easy, gentlemen?' I responded. 'Well, I tell you that boy has sweated for it since he was seven years old. It's the only way, too, I'm sure of it. If you want to succeed, you've got to begin by sweating.'" "Thank you, General, but I suppose most things look easy until you've tried them." "It doesn't look easy to me, Ben, when I've seen you at it all day and half the night since you were a boy. What I said to those fellows at the club is the Gospel truth--there's but one way to get anything in this world, and that is by sweating for it." We were in his study, to which he was confined by an attack of the gout, and at such times he loved to ramble on in his aging, reminiscent habit. "You know, General," I said, "that they want me to accept the presidency of the Union Bank in Jennings' place. I've been one of the directors, you see, for the last three or four years." "You'd be the youngest bank president in the country. It's a good thing, and you'd control enough money to keep you awake at night. But remember, Ben, as my dear old coloured mammy used to say to me, 'to hatch first ain't always to crow last.'" "Do you call it hatching or crowing to become president of the Union Bank?"