John Valiant’s testimony, to those of his listeners who cherished a sordid disbelief in the ingenuousness of the man who counts his wealth in seven figures, seemed a pose of gratuitous insolence. It had a clarity and simplicity that was almost horrifying. He did not stoop to gloze his own monumental flippancy. He had attended only one directors’ meeting during that year. Till after the crash, he had known little, had cared less, about the larger investments of the Corporation’s capital: he had left all that to others. Perhaps to the examiner himself this blunt directness—the bitter unshadowed truth that searched for no evasions—had appeared effrontery; the contemptuous and cynical frankness of the young egoist who sat secure, his own millions safe, on the ruins of the enterprise from which they were derived. The questions, that had been bland with suave innuendo, acquired an acrid sarcasm, a barbed and stinging satire, which at length touched indiscretion. He allowed himself a scornful reference [Pg 17]to the elder Valiant as scathing as it was unjustified. To the man in the witness-chair this had been like an electric shock. Something new and unguessed beneath the husk of boredom, the indolent pose of body, had suddenly looked from his blazing eyes: something foreign to Vanity Valiant, the club habitu , the spoiled scion of wealth. For a brief five minutes he spoke, in a fashion that surprised the court room—a passionate defense of his father, the principles on which the Corporation had been founded and its traditional policies: few sentences, but each hot as lava and quivering with feeling. Their very force startled the reporters’ bench and left his inquisitor for a moment silent. The latter took refuge in a sardonic reference to the Corporation’s salary-list. Did the witness conceive, he asked with effective deliberation, that he had rendered services commensurate with the annual sums paid him? The witness thought that he had, in fact, received just about what those services were worth. Would Mr. Valiant be good enough to state the figures of the salary he had been privileged to draw as a vice-president? The answer fell as slowly in the sardonic silence. “I have never drawn a salary as an officer of the Valiant Corporation.” Then it was that the irritated examiner had abruptly dismissed the witness. Then the ripple [Pg 18]had swept over the assemblage, and Katharine Fargo, gazing, had smiled that slow smile in which approval struggled with mingled wonder and question. The jostling crowd flocked out into the square, among them a fresh-faced girl on the arm of a gray-bearded man in black frock coat and picturesque broad-brimmed felt hat. She turned her eyes to his. “So that,” she said, “is John Valiant! I’d almost rather have missed Niagara Falls. I must write Shirley Dandridge about it. I’m so sorry I lost that picture of him that I cut out of the paper.”