The Financier quotes

Frank only stared. Too bad he had missed this. The least touch of sorrow for the squid came to him as he stared at it slain. Then he gazed at the victor.

“That’s the way it has to be, I guess,” he commented to himself. “That squid wasn’t quick enough.”

He figured it out.

what brokers did; what stocks were, and why they fluctuated in value. He began to see clearly what was meant by money as a medium of exchange, and how all values were calculated according to one primary value, that of gold.

He was a financier by instinct, and all the knowledge that pertained to that great art was as natural to him as the emotions and subtleties of life are to a poet.

This medium of exchange, gold, interested him intensely. When his father explained to him how it was mined, he dreamed that he owned a gold mine and waked to wish that he did.

“Well, you can’t leave school much before sixteen. You’ll do better if you stay until seventeen or eighteen. It can’t do you any harm. You won’t be a boy again.”

“I don’t want to be a boy. I want to get to work.”

“Don’t go too fast, son. You’ll be a man soon enough. You want to be a banker, do you?”

He took subscriptions for a boys’ paper; handled the agency for the sale of a new kind of ice-skate, and once organized a band of neighborhood youths into a union for the purpose of purchasing their summer straw hats at wholesale.

It was not his idea that he could get rich by saving. From the first he had the notion that liberal spending was better, and that somehow he would get along.

It was in this year, or a little earlier, that he began to take an interest in girls. He had from the first a keen eye for the beautiful among them;

His head was large, shapely, notably commercial in aspect, thickly covered with crisp, dark-brown hair and fixed on a pair of square shoulders and a stocky body. Already his eyes had the look that subtle years of thought bring.

They were inscrutable. You could tell nothing by his eyes.

He walked with a light, confident, springy step. Life had given him no severe shocks nor rude awakenings. He had not been compelled to suffer illness or pain or deprivation of any kind. He saw people richer than himself, but he hoped to be rich.

His family was respected, his father well placed. He owed no man anything. Once he had let a small note of his become overdue at the bank, but his father raised such a row that he never forgot it.

“I would rather crawl on my hands and knees than let my paper go to protest,”

the old gentleman observed; and this fixed in his mind what scarcely needed to be so sharply emphasized—the significance of credit. No paper of his ever went to protest or became overdue after that through any negligence of his.

but why shouldn’t they be? He was efficient, he knew that; under him things moved smoothly. It never occurred to him that he belonged in the realm of clerkdom. Those people were the kind of beings who ought to work for him, and who would.

There was nothing savage in his attitude, no rage against fate, no dark fear of failure.

These two men he worked for were already nothing more than characters in his eyes—their business significated itself. He could see their weaknesses and their shortcomings as a much older man might have viewed a boy’s.

He pictured to himself the dreariness of the mornings after, the stale dregs of things when only sleep and thought of gain could aid in the least; and more than once, even at his age, he shook his head.

He wanted contact which was more intimate, subtle, individual, personal.

So came Lillian Semple, who was nothing more to him than the shadow of an ideal. Yet she cleared up certain of his ideas in regard to women.

A man, a real man, must never be an agent, a tool, or a gambler—acting for himself or for others—he must employ such. A real man—a financier—was never a tool.

He used tools. He created. He led.

Clearly, very clearly, at nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one years of age, he saw all this, but he was not quite ready yet to do anything about it. He was certain, however, that his day would come.

Anything less than straight-out sales to realize quickly on assets, or buying to hold as an investment, was gambling pure and simple, and these men were gamblers.

He was nothing more than a gambler’s agent.

It was not troubling him any just at this moment, but it was not at all a mystery now, what he was.

Semple had died, which had illustrated to him very clearly what an uncertain thing the brokerage business was. There was really a severe business depression. Money was so scarce that it could fairly be said not to exist at all.

Capital, frightened by uncertain trade and money conditions, everywhere, retired to its hiding-places in banks, vaults, teakettles, and stockings.

The country seemed to be going to the dogs. War with the South or secession was vaguely looming up in the distance. The temper of the whole nation was nervous. People dumped their holdings on the market in order to get money.

No other woman was holding him like that. It never occurred to him that he could not or should not like other women at the same time.

There was a great deal of palaver about the sanctity of the home. It rolled off his mental sphere like water off the feathers of a duck.

He was not eager for her money, though he was well aware of it. He felt that he could use it to her advantage. He wanted her physically. He felt a keen, primitive interest in the children they would have.

“Don’t worry about yours.

I’m not marrying your family. I’m marrying you.

We have independent means.”

They were going to consider his case personally, because he demanded that it be considered—nothing more. Others more influential than himself had quite as much right to a share, but they didn’t take it.

Nerve, ideas, aggressiveness, how these counted when one had luck!

He went away thinking how surprised Drexel & Co. and Cooke & Co. would be to see him appearing in the field as a competitor.

Let us say there was always lurking in her a sense of grandeur coupled with a love of color and a love of love. From the first she was somewhat sex-conscious. She had no desire for accuracy, no desire for precise information.

Innate sensuousness rarely has. It basks in sunshine, bathes in color, dwells in a sense of the impressive and the gorgeous, and rests there.

Accuracy is not necessary except in the case of aggressive, acquisitive natures, when it manifests itself in a desire to seize. True controlling sensuousness cannot be manifested in the most active dispositions, nor again in the most accurate.

She was not very orderly, and she loved lavishness of display; and her curtains, hangings, table ornaments, and pictures inclined to gorgeousness, which did not go well with the rest of the house.

Aileen always reminded Cowperwood of a high-stepping horse without a checkrein.

He met her at various times, shopping with her mother, out driving with her father, and he was always interested and amused at the affected, bored tone she assumed before him—the “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!

There was something about his steady, even gait, his stocky body and handsome head, which attracted her. In spite of her vanity and egotism, she felt a little overawed before him at times—keyed up. She seemed to grow gayer and more brilliant in his presence.

The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character.

All individuals are a bundle of contradictions—none more so than the most capable.

He was one of those men, of whom there are so many thousands in every large community, with no breadth of vision, no real subtlety, no craft, no great skill in anything.

You would never hear a new idea emanating from Stener. He never had one in his life.

On the other hand, he was not a bad fellow. He had a stodgy, dusty, commonplace look to him which was more a matter of mind than of body. His eye was of vague gray-blue; his hair a dusty light-brown and thin.

They lend dignity, subtlety, force, each to the other, and what beauty, or lack of it, there is, is shot back and forth from one to the other as a shuttle in a loom, weaving, weaving.

Cut the thread, separate a man from that which is rightfully his own, characteristic of him, and you have a peculiar figure, half success, half failure, much as a spider without its web, which will never be its whole self again until all its dignities and emoluments are restored.

The sight of his new house going up made Cowperwood feel of more weight in the world, and the possession of his suddenly achieved connection with the city treasurer was as though a wide door had been thrown open to the Elysian fields of opportunity.

The effect of a house of this character on its owner is unmistakable.

We think we are individual, separate, above houses and material objects generally; but there is a subtle connection which makes them reflect us quite as much as we reflect them.

They lend dignity, subtlety, force, each to the other, and what beauty, or lack of it, there is, is shot back and forth from one to the other as a shuttle in a loom, weaving, weaving.

My house is my house. I want to live here. I’ve lived here too long to be pickin’ up and movin’ away. If you don’t like it you know what else you can do. Move if you want to. I’ll not move.”

It was Butler’s habit when he became involved in these family quarrels, which were as shallow as puddles, to wave his hands rather antagonistically under his wife’s or his children’s noses.

“Oh, well, I will get out one of these days,” Aileen replied. “Thank heaven I won’t have to live here forever.”

and her eyebrows had been emphasized by a pencil into something almost as significant as her hair. She was, for the occasion, a little too emphatic, perhaps, and yet more because of her burning vitality than of her costume.

Art for her should have meant subduing her physical and spiritual significance. Life for her meant emphasizing them.

“Lillian!” Anna nudged her sister-in-law. She was grieved to think that Aileen was wearing black and looked so much better than either of them.

She had removed from her arm the black satin ribbon which held her train and kicked the skirts loose and free. Her eyes gleamed almost pleadingly for all her hauteur, like a spirited collie’s, and her even teeth showed beautifully.

Cowperwood understood her precisely, as he did any fine, spirited animal.

“I can’t tell you how nice you look,” he whispered to her, familiarly, as though there was an old understanding between them. “You’re like fire and song.”

The ballroom, as she entered, was lovely enough. The young men and young women she saw there were interesting, and she was not wanting for admirers. The most aggressive of these youths—the most forceful—recognized in this maiden a fillip to life, a sting to existence.

She was as a honey-jar surrounded by too-hungry flies.

But it occurred to her, as her dance-list was filling up, that there was not much left for Mr. Cowperwood, if he should care to dance with her.

Cowperwood was innately and primarily an egoist and intellectual, though blended strongly therewith, was a humane and democratic spirit. We think of egoism and intellectualism as closely confined to the arts.

Finance is an art. And it presents the operations of the subtlest of the intellectuals and of the egoists.

Cowperwood was a financier.

The thing for him to do was to get rich and hold his own—to build up a seeming of virtue and dignity which would pass muster for the genuine thing. Force would do that. Quickness of wit. And he had these.

“I satisfy myself,” was his motto; and it might well have been emblazoned upon any coat of arms which he could have contrived to set forth his claim to intellectual and social nobility.

But this matter of Aileen was up for consideration and solution at this present moment, and because of his forceful, determined character he was presently not at all disturbed by the problem it presented.

No word had ever passed between them but he had been as conscious of her as she of him. Then came Frank Cowperwood, and by degrees, because of his presence and contact, he had been slowly built up in her mind as the ideal person.

She was drawn as planets are drawn to their sun.

It is a question as to what would have happened if antagonistic forces could have been introduced just at this time. Emotions and liaisons of this character can, of course, occasionally be broken up and destroyed.

Some adjustment would be made, somehow. Nature had given her this man. She relied on him implicitly. When he told her that he would take care of her so that nothing evil should befall, she believed him fully.

Such sins are the commonplaces of the confessional.

It is a curious fact that by some subtlety of logic in the Christian world, it has come to be believed that there can be no love outside the conventional process of courtship and marriage.

And yet this fact should not necessarily carry with it a condemnation of all love not so fortunate as to find so happy a denouement.

Life cannot be put into any mold, and the attempt might as well be abandoned at once.

Those so fortunate as to find harmonious companionship for life should congratulate themselves and strive to be worthy of it. Those not so blessed, though they be written down as pariahs, have yet some justification.

And for Edward Malia Butler he occasionally carried as high as one hundred thousand dollars in margins. His own loans at the banks, varying from day to day on variously hypothecated securities, were as high as seven and eight hundred thousand dollars.

Like a spider in a spangled net, every thread of which he knew, had laid, had tested, he had surrounded and entangled himself in a splendid, glittering network of connections, and he was watching all the details.

His one pet idea, the thing he put more faith in than anything else, was his street-railway manipulations, and particularly his actual control of the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Street line.

She wanted luxury, magnificence, social station. Well, if she could get this man they would come to her. There were, apparently, insuperable barriers in the way; but hers was no weakling nature, and neither was his.

They ran together temperamentally from the first like two leopards.

Her own thoughts—crude, half formulated, half spoken—nevertheless matched his to a degree in the equality of their force and their raw directness.

“Ho! Extra! Extra! Chicago burning down! Extra! Extra!”

The cries were long-drawn-out, ominous, pathetic.

In the dusk of the dreary Sunday afternoon, when the city had apparently retired to Sabbath meditation and prayer, with that tinge of the dying year in the foliage and in the air, one caught a sense of something grim and gloomy.

It was a big face, impressive, well modeled.

He was an excellent friend of Edward Malia Butler’s, as such friendships go, and his regard for Mark Simpson was as sincere as that of one tiger for another.

He respected ability; he was willing to play fair when fair was the game. When it was not, the reach of his cunning was not easily measured.

It was a big face, impressive, well modeled. He was an excellent friend of Edward Malia Butler’s, as such friendships go, and his regard for Mark Simpson was as sincere as that of one tiger for another.

He respected ability; he was willing to play fair when fair was the game. When it was not, the reach of his cunning was not easily measured.

When Edward Butler and his son arrived on this Sunday evening, this distinguished representative of one-third of the city’s interests was not expecting them. He was in his library reading and listening to one of his daughters playing the piano.

“Quite so,” said Mollenhauer.

Senator Simpson merely looked the deep things that he thought.

He, too, was thinking how useless it was for anyone to approach a group of politicians with a proposition like this, particularly in a crisis such as bid fair to occur.

They could spread rumors as to Cowperwood’s condition and then offer to take his shares off his hands—for a song, of course.

It was an evil moment that led Cowperwood to Butler.

“Well, now,” said the Senator, after a prolonged silence, “I might sympathize with Mr. Cowperwood in his situation, and I certainly don’t blame him for buying up street-railways if he can;

It’s a case of dog eat dog in this game and this particular situation and it’s up to us to save ourselves against everybody or go down together, and that’s just what I’m here to tell you.

Mollenhauer doesn’t care any more for you today than he does for that lamppost.

It isn’t that money you’ve paid out to me that’s worrying him, but who’s getting something for it and what. Well they know that you and I are getting street-railways, don’t you see, and they don’t want us to have them.

You’ve made money through me—lots of it. If you’re wise, George, you’ll go to your office and write me your check for three hundred thousand dollars, anyhow, before you do a single other thing. Don’t see anybody and don’t do anything till you’ve done that.

You can’t be hung any more for a sheep than you can for a lamb.

No one can prevent you from giving me that check. You’re the city treasurer.

How was it he had failed to detect the real subtlety of this man? How was it he had never seen any sign of it, if there had been anything between Cowperwood and Aileen?

Parents are frequently inclined, because of a time-flattered sense of security, to take their children for granted.

Nothing ever has happened, so nothing ever will happen. They see their children every day, and through the eyes of affection;

John is a straightforward, steady-going boy—how could he get into trouble? The astonishment of most parents at the sudden accidental revelation of evil in connection with any of their children is almost invariably pathetic.

“My John! My Mary! Impossible!” But it is possible. Very possible. Decidedly likely.

Some, through lack of experience or understanding, or both, grow hard and bitter on the instant. They feel themselves astonishingly abased in the face of notable tenderness and sacrifice.

He did not know what the right thing was, he finally confessed to himself. Aileen! Aileen! His Aileen! If her mother knew this it would break her heart. She mustn’t! She mustn’t! And yet mustn’t she?

The heart of a father! The world wanders into many strange bypaths of affection.

The love of a mother for her children is dominant, leonine, selfish, and unselfish. It is concentric. The love of a husband for his wife, or of a lover for his sweetheart, is a sweet bond of agreement and exchange trade in a lovely contest.

The love of a mother for her children is dominant, leonine, selfish, and unselfish. It is concentric. The love of a husband for his wife, or of a lover for his sweetheart, is a sweet bond of agreement and exchange trade in a lovely contest.

The love of a father for his son or daughter, where it is love at all, is a broad, generous, sad, contemplative giving without thought of return, a hail and farewell to a troubled traveler whom he would do much to guard, a balanced judgment of weakness and strength, with pity for failure and pride in achievement.

It is a lovely, generous, philosophic blossom which rarely asks too much, and seeks only to give wisely and plentifully. “That my boy may succeed! That my daughter may be happy!”

Mollenhauer looked at him calmly, meditatively. How often had he seen weaklings no more dishonest than himself, but without his courage and subtlety, pleading to him in this fashion, not on their knees exactly, but intellectually so!

Life to him, as to every other man of large practical knowledge and insight, was an inexplicable tangle.

What were you going to do about the so-called morals and precepts of the world? This man Stener fancied that he was dishonest, and that he, Mollenhauer, was honest.

He was looking at Stener’s face, and seeing fear and a pained and yet very definite necessity for opposition written there. “

Chicago is burning, but it will be built up again. Business will be all the better for it later on.

Now, I want you to be reasonable and help me. Don’t get frightened.”

She looked at his still, pale face, and a sudden strong determination to fight for him welled up in her heart.

Her love was unjust, illegal, outlawed; but it was love, just the same, and had much of the fiery daring of the outcast from justice.

“I love you! I love you! I love you, Frank!” she declared. He unloosed her hands.

Stener was browbeating and frightening his poor underling, a better man than himself, in order to get back this sixty-thousand-dollar check. What a petty creature he was!

How true it was, as somebody had remarked, that you could not possibly measure the petty meannesses to which a fool could stoop!

“You go back to Mr. Stener, Albert, and tell him that it can’t be done. The certificates of loan were purchased before his order arrived, and the records of the exchange will prove it. There is no illegality here.

She picked it up, glanced at it curiously because it was on cheap paper, and then opened it. Her face paled slightly as she read it; and then her hand trembled—not much.

Hers was not a soul that ever loved passionately, hence she could not suffer passionately.

She was hurt, disgusted, enraged for the moment, and frightened; but she was not broken in spirit entirely. Thirteen years of life with Frank Cowperwood had taught her a number of things.

Apparently this was not true. What should she do? What say? How act? Her none too brilliant mind was not of much service in this crisis. She did not know very well how either to plan or to fight.

The conventional mind is at best a petty piece of machinery. It is oyster-like in its functioning, or, perhaps better, clam-like.

It has its little siphon of thought-processes forced up or down into the mighty ocean of fact and circumstance; but it uses so little, pumps so faintly, that the immediate contiguity of the vast mass is not disturbed.

The siphon does not work right. It sucks in fear and distress. There is great grinding of maladjusted parts—not unlike sand in a machine—and life, as is so often the case, ceases or goes lamely ever after.

Mrs. Cowperwood was possessed of a conventional mind. She really knew nothing about life. And life could not teach her.

Reaction in her from salty thought-processes was not possible. She was not alive in the sense that Aileen Butler was, and yet she thought that she was very much alive. All illusion. She wasn’t. She was charming if you loved placidity.

“I know all about that,” interrupted Cowperwood, irritably. “My case isn’t any different from the others, and you know it.

Embezzlement is embezzlement if the politicians want to have it so.

” He fell to thinking, and Steger got up and strolled about leisurely. He was thinking also.

I am not any more criminally responsible for that sixty thousand dollars than I am for the five hundred thousand dollars that I had as loan before it—not as much so.

I did not create this panic. I did not set Chicago on fire.

Mr. Stener and his friends have been reaping some profit out of dealing with me.

Mr. Abner Sengstack wrote that also, and had Mr. Stener sign it. And Mr. Mollenhauer’s comment on that, before it was sent, was that he thought it was “all right.”

It was a time when all the little rats and mice were scurrying to cover because of the presence of a great, fiery-eyed public cat somewhere in the dark, and only the older and wiser rats were able to act.

Indeed, at this very time and for some days past now, Messrs. Mollenhauer, Butler, and Simpson were, and had been, considering with Mr.

During all this whirl of disaster he had never once lost his head or his courage. That thing conscience, which obsesses and rides some people to destruction, did not trouble him at all.

He had no consciousness of what is currently known as sin.

There were just two faces to the shield of life from the point of view of his peculiar mind—strength and weakness. Right and wrong? He did not know about those. They were bound up in metaphysical abstrusities about which he did not care to bother.

There were just two faces to the shield of life from the point of view of his peculiar mind—strength and weakness. Right and wrong? He did not know about those. They were bound up in metaphysical abstrusities about which he did not care to bother.

Good and evil? Those were toys of clerics, by which they made money.

And as for social favor or social ostracism which, on occasion, so quickly followed upon the heels of disaster of any kind, well, what was social ostracism? Had either he or his parents been of the best society as yet?

It was a foolish scheme, a brutalizing thing to do, both from the point of view of affection and any corrective theory he might have had.

No good ever springs from violence.

But Butler did not see that. He wanted to frighten Aileen, to bring her by shock to a realization of the enormity of the offense she was committing. He waited fully a week after his word had been given;

“Others!” echoed Aileen, resentfully and contemptuously. “After you there aren’t any others. I just want one man, my Frank.

If you ever desert me, I’ll go to hell. You’ll see.

”

“Others!” echoed Aileen, resentfully and contemptuously. “

After you there aren’t any others. I just want one man, my Frank.

If you ever desert me, I’ll go to hell. You’ll see.”

Perhaps it was not. Might there be some other Mrs. Montague—a real one? Supposing it was her father—he had been so nice to her in not telling the family, in keeping her secret thus far. He loved her—she knew that.

It makes all the difference in the world in a child’s attitude on an occasion like this whether she has been loved and petted and spoiled, or the reverse.

Aileen had been loved and petted and spoiled. She could not think of her father doing anything terrible physically to her or to anyone else. But it was so hard to confront him—to look into his eyes.

It was to be a battle royal between them from now on. As they rode—in complete silence for a while—her hands clasped and unclasped defiantly, her nails cutting her palms, and her mouth hardened.

It is an open question whether raw opposition ever accomplishes anything of value in this world.

It seems so inherent in this mortal scheme of things that it appears to have a vast validity. It is more than likely that we owe this spectacle called life to it, and that this can be demonstrated scientifically;

For purposes of social success, in order not to offend, to smooth one’s path, make things easy, avoid useless criticism, and the like, it was necessary to create an outward seeming—ostensibly conform. Beyond that it was not necessary to do anything.

Never fail, never get caught. If you did, fight your way out silently and say nothing.

That was what he was doing in connection with his present financial troubles; that was what he had been ready to do the other day when they were caught. It was something of all this that was coloring Aileen’s mood as she listened at present.

Why, why shouldn’t I? What else have I to live for but me children? It’s ye and the rest of them that I’ve been workin’ and plannin’ for all these years. Come now, be a good girl. Ye love your old father, don’t ye?

Why, I rocked ye in my arms as a baby, Aileen.

I’ve watched over ye when ye were not bigger than what would rest in me two fists here. I’ve been a good father to ye—ye can’t deny that. Look at the other girls you’ve seen.

He drove quickly back to his office, and Aileen returned to her home determined to put her plan into action. Her father had given her some little time in which to decide—possibly he would give her longer—but she would not wait.

Having always had her wish granted in everything, she could not understand why she was not to have her way this time.

It was about five o’clock now. She would wait until all the members of the family were comfortably seated at the dinner-table, which would be about seven o’clock, and then slip out.

But the sight of his name quoted daily as being about his duties, or rendering such and such a decision, was a great satisfaction to him. He thought it made him a significant figure in the world.

“Behold I am not as other men,” he often thought, and this comforted him.

He was very much flattered when a prominent case came to his calendar; and as he sat enthroned before the various litigants and lawyers he felt, as a rule, very significant indeed. Now and then some subtlety of life would confuse his really limited intellect;

… in principle, or rather belief, beholden to the dominant party councils for his personal continuance in office, and as such willing and anxious to do whatever he considered that he reasonably could do to further the party welfare and the private interests of his masters.

Most people never trouble to look into the mechanics of the thing they call their conscience too closely.

Where they do, too often they lack the skill to disentangle the tangled threads of ethics and morals. Whatever the opinion of the time is, whatever the weight of great interests dictates, that they conscientiously believe. Someone has since invented the phrase “a corporation-minded judge.”

Most people never trouble to look into the mechanics of the thing they call their conscience too closely. Where they do, too often they lack the skill to disentangle the tangled threads of ethics and morals.

Whatever the opinion of the time is, whatever the weight of great interests dictates, that they conscientiously believe.

Someone has since invented the phrase “a corporation-minded judge.” There are many such.

Where they do, too often they lack the skill to disentangle the tangled threads of ethics and morals. Whatever the opinion of the time is, whatever the weight of great interests dictates, that they conscientiously believe.

Someone has since invented the phrase “a corporation-minded judge.” There are many such.

Payderson was one. He fairly revered property and power. To him Butler and Mollenhauer and Simpson were great men—reasonably sure to be right always because they were so powerful. This matter of Cowperwood’s and Stener’s defalcation he had long heard of.

Lawyers in the main were intellectual mercenaries to be bought and sold in any cause. It amused him to hear the ethical and emotional platitudes of lawyers, to see how readily they would lie, steal, prevaricate, misrepresent in almost any cause and for any purpose.

Great lawyers were merely great unscrupulous subtleties, like himself, sitting back in dark, close-woven lairs like spiders and awaiting the approach of unwary human flies.

Life was at best a dark, inhuman, unkind, unsympathetic struggle built of cruelties and the law, and its lawyers were the most despicable representatives of the whole unsatisfactory mess.

As for judges, they were merely incompetent lawyers, at a rule, who were shelved by some fortunate turn of chance, and who would not, in all likelihood, be as efficient as the lawyers who pleaded before them if they were put in the same position.

He had no respect for judges⁠—he knew too much about them.

He knew how often they were sycophants, political climbers, political hacks, tools, timeservers, judicial doormats lying before the financially and politically great and powerful who used them as such. Judges were fools, as were most other people in this dusty, shifty world. Pah!

He had no respect for judges—he knew too much about them. He knew how often they were sycophants, political climbers, political hacks, tools, timeservers, judicial doormats lying before the financially and politically great and powerful who used them as such.

Judges were fools, as were most other people in this dusty, shifty world.

Pah! His inscrutable eyes took them all in and gave no sign. His only safety lay, he thought, in the magnificent subtley of his own brain, and nowhere else.

Judges were fools, as were most other people in this dusty, shifty world. Pah! His inscrutable eyes took them all in and gave no sign. His only safety lay, he thought, in the magnificent subtley of his own brain, and nowhere else.

You could not convince Cowperwood of any great or inherent virtue in this mortal scheme of things. He knew too much; he knew himself.

When the judge finally cleared away the various minor motions pending, he ordered his clerk to call the case of the City of Philadelphia versus Frank A. Cowperwood, which was done in a clear voice.

It is amazingly interesting to see how a jury will waver and speculate in a case like this—how curious and uncertain is the process by which it makes up its so-called mind.

So-called truth is a nebulous thing at best; facts are capable of such curious inversion and interpretation, honest and otherwise.

The jury had a strongly complicated problem before it, and it went over it and over it.

So-called truth is a nebulous thing at best; facts are capable of such curious inversion and interpretation, honest and otherwise. The jury had a strongly complicated problem before it, and it went over it and over it.

Juries reach not so much definite conclusions as verdicts, in a curious fashion and for curious reasons.

Very often a jury will have concluded little so far as its individual members are concerned and yet it will have reached a verdict. The matter of time, as all lawyers know, plays a part in this.

One man “standing out” for the definite thought that is in him is apt to become either the triumphant leader of a pliant mass or the brutally battered target of a flaming, concentrated intellectual fire.

Men despise dull opposition that is without reason.

In a jury-room, of all places, a man is expected to give a reason for the faith that is in him—if one is demanded. It will not do to say, “I cannot agree.” Jurors have been known to fight.

On the other hand, no jury contemplates a disagreement with any degree of satisfaction.

There is something so inherently constructive in the human mind that to leave a problem unsolved is plain misery.

It haunts the average individual like any other important task left unfinished.

It wasn’t much, as Aileen could herself see, but Cowperwood would help her. If he did not arrange to take care of her, and her father would not relent, she would have to get something to do.

Little she knew of the steely face the world presents to those who have not been practically trained and are not economically efficient.

She did not understand the bitter reaches of life at all.

His best friends in the financial world were by now convinced that his was a sinking ship.

A student of finance once observed that nothing is so sensitive as money, and the financial mind partakes largely of the quality of the thing in which it deals.

There was no use trying to do much for a man who might be going to prison for a term of years.

He was a strong man, surely—and a brilliant one. Never had Third Street seen a more pyrotechnic, and yet fascinating and financially aggressive, and at the same time, conservative person. Yet might one not fairly tempt Nemesis by a too great daring and egotism?

Like Death, it loves a shining mark.

He should not, perhaps, have seduced Butler’s daughter; unquestionably he should not have so boldly taken that check, especially after his quarrel and break with Stener. He was a little too aggressive.

“I don’t know, Frank, I’m sure; I’ll see. I’ll go around and talk to him tonight. Perhaps a hundred dollars will make him relax the rigor of his rules that much.”

“I fancy a hundred dollars would make Jaspers relax a whole lot of rules,”

he replied, and he got up to go.

She looked up, at his step, with the peculiarly uncertain smile she used these days—indication of her pain, fear, suspicion—and inquired, “Well, what is new with you, Frank?”

Her smile was something like a hat or belt or ornament which one puts on or off at will.

“Nothing in particular,” he replied, in his offhand way, “except that I understand I have lost that appeal of mine. Steger is coming here in a little while to let me know. I had a note from him, and I fancy it’s about that.”

“Oh, Frank!” she had it on her lips to cry, but before she could utter it he had bustled down the steps and was gone. She turned back to the table, her left hand to her mouth, her eyes in a queer, hazy, melancholy mist.

Could it be, she thought, that life could really come to this⁠—that love could so utterly, so thoroughly die?

Ten years before—but, oh, why go back to that? Obviously it could, and thoughts concerning that would not help now.

Oh, didn’t she know! And Cowperwood, looking in her eyes and realizing this reasonless, if so comforting fever for him, smiled and was touched.

Such love! That of a dog for a master; that of a mother for a child.

And how had he come to evoke it? He could not say, but it was beautiful.

I can go heavily veiled. I don’t think that the warden knows my father. He may. Anyhow, he doesn’t know me; and he wouldn’t tell on me if he did if I talked to him.”

Her confidence in her charms, her personality, her earthly privileges was quite anarchistic.

Cowperwood shook his head.

Her confidence in her charms, her personality, her earthly privileges was quite anarchistic. Cowperwood shook his head.

“Honey, you’re about the best and the worst there is when it comes to a woman,”

he observed, affectionately, pulling her head down to kiss her, “but you’ll have to listen to me just the same. I have a lawyer, Steger—you know him. He’s going to take up this matter with the warden out there—is doing it today.

For this he was properly grateful. He now considered his superior with nervous doglike eyes, and looked at Cowperwood with a certain cunning appreciation of his lot and a show of initial mistrust.

One prisoner is as good as another to the average convict; as a matter of fact, it is their only consolation in their degradation that all who come here are no better than they.

The world may have misused them; but they misuse their confreres in their thoughts. The “holier than thou” attitude, intentional or otherwise, is quite the last and most deadly offense within prison walls.

The world may have misused them; but they misuse their confreres in their thoughts. The “holier than thou” attitude, intentional or otherwise, is quite the last and most deadly offense within prison walls.

This particular trusty could no more understand Cowperwood than could a fly the motions of a flywheel; but with the cocky superiority of the underling of the world he did not hesitate to think that he could.

A crook was a crook to him—Cowperwood no less than the shabbiest pickpocket. His one feeling was that he would like to demean him, to pull him down to his own level.

Cowperwood stood there while the water ran, meditating on his fate. It was strange how life had dealt with him of late—so severely.

Unlike most men in his position, he was not suffering from a consciousness of evil. He did not think he was evil. As he saw it, he was merely unfortunate.

To think that he should be actually in this great, silent penitentiary, a convict, waiting here beside this cheap iron bathtub, not very sweet or hygienic to contemplate, with this crackbrained criminal to watch over him!

Desmas was stirred. Compared with Stener, whom he knew in the past and whom he had met on his entry, this man was a force.

Say what you will, one vigorous man inherently respects another.

And Desmas was vigorous physically. He eyed Cowperwood and Cowperwood eyed him. Instinctively Desmas liked him. He was like one tiger looking at another.

Say what you will, one vigorous man inherently respects another. And Desmas was vigorous physically. He eyed Cowperwood and Cowperwood eyed him. Instinctively Desmas liked him.

He was like one tiger looking at another.

Instinctively Cowperwood knew that he was the warden. “This is Mr. Desmas, isn’t it?” he asked, courteously and pleasantly.

He was taken out on several days on a court order, between nine and five, to testify in the bankruptcy proceedings against him, which caused the time in the beginning to pass quickly.

It was curious, once he was in prison, safely shut from the world for a period of years apparently, how quickly all thought of assisting him departed from the minds of those who had been most friendly.

He was done, so most of them thought. The only thing they could do now would be to use their influence to get him out some time; how soon, they could not guess. Beyond that there was nothing.

how soon, they could not guess. Beyond that there was nothing. He would really never be of any great importance to anyone any more, or so they thought.

It was very sad, very tragic, but he was gone⁠—his place knew him not.

“A bright young man, that,” observed President Davison of the Girard National, on reading of Cowperwood’s sentence and incarceration. “Too bad! Too bad! He made a great mistake.”

He really degenerated, although he did not know it, into a mere automaton.

Life strews its shores with such interesting and pathetic wrecks.

One of the things that caused Cowperwood no little thought at this time, and especially in view of his present extreme indifference to her, was how he would bring up this matter of his indifference to his wife and his desire to end their relationship.

It was not given all men to see far or to do brilliantly; but to him it was given, and he must be what he was cut out to be.

There was no more escaping the greatness that was inherent in him than there was for so many others the littleness that was in them.

Mrs. Cowperwood came in that afternoon quite solemnly, bearing several changes of linen, a pair of sheets, some potted meat and a pie.

Who could tell? At any rate he had made it plain to her what he intended to do and that was something as he saw it.

He reminded one of nothing so much, as he stood there, as of a young chicken picking its way out of the shell of an old estate.

Although he was in a cell of a penitentiary, with nearly four years more to serve, yet obviously he felt, within himself, that the whole world was still before him. He could go west if he could not reestablish himself in Philadelphia;

He could go west if he could not reestablish himself in Philadelphia; but he must stay here long enough to win the approval of those who had known him formerly—to obtain, as it were, a letter of credit which he could carry to other parts.

“Hard words break no bones,” he said to himself, as his wife went out. “A man’s never done till he’s done. I’ll show some of these people yet.”

Of Bonhag, who came to close the cell door, he asked whether it was going to rain, it looked so dark in the hall.