As often happened with her in moments of excitement, the expanded pupils of her violet eyes crept over and all but blotted out the iris, until out of the heavy shadows that hung under her full brow, they glowed faintly, in certain lights, with an animal-like luminousness. “Those eyes—they look as though a halo had melted and run down into them!” Durkin had once cried, half wonderingly, half playfully, as he turned her face from shadow to light and back to shadow again. He had looked for some word of disapproval from her, for he could remember how often, with her continuous scruples, she had taken the razor-edge off his enthusiasm, when he stood on the brink of adventuring with something big and momentous. So he studied her face abstractedly, his own alight with an eager and predaceously alert look which only his half-whimsical, half-boyish smile held above the plane of sheer vulpine craftiness. “Why, this man Curry,” he went on, still standing in front of her, “has got such a grip on the market that he can simply juggle with it. Before this boom you or I could buy a bale of cotton on a dollar margin. Today, most of the brokerage houses insist on a four dollar margin, some of them demanding a five, and it’s said that a ten dollar margin can still be looked for.” “But still, I don’t see how one man can do this, and keep it up!” “It’s mostly all the natural outcome of his own, individual, long-headed plot. Beyond that, it’s a mere infection, a mania, an operation of mob-law, the case of sheep following a sheep. Curry, all along, is crying out that the demand has outgrown the supply, and that the commercial world has got to get used to the idea of twenty-cent cotton. In the old days it used to sell away down around six cents, and ever since then mills have been increasing their spindles,—in ten years, Curry’s papers claim, the mills have added more than seventeen million spindles to swell this tremendous cry for cotton. That’s his argument, to tide him along until he kicks the post out, and the drop comes. Then of course, he and the rest of his bull pool have been buying, buying, buying, always openly and magnificently, yet all the while, selling quietly and secretly.” “And they call this legitimate business?” she demanded, with the familiar tinge of scorn in her voice. “Yes, they call it high finance. But it’s about as legitimate, on the whole, as the pea and thimble game I used to watch up at the county fairs in Canada. In other words, Frank, when we carry on our particular line of business cleanly and decently, we are a hanged sight more honest than these Exchange manipulators.” “But not recognized!” she cut in, for she knew that with this unction of comparison he was salving a still tender conscience. “That’s because we are such small fry,” he went on heatedly. “But, by heavens, when we get this thing going, I guess we’ll rather count a little!” “And what is to keep us from getting it going?” He wheeled on her suddenly.