“Well, sir, I should feel much better if I could go over there into the swirl and smash it out for myself.  You see if I could win out alone and pay back the seat price, and then make a pile for myself, if you felt later like giving me another chance to come into the firm, then I should not be laying myself open to the charge of being a mere pensioner on your friendship.  You know what I mean, sir, and won’t think I am filled with any low-down pride, but if you will let me have the price of a Stock Exchange seat on my note, and will give me the chance, when I get the hang of the ropes, to handle some of the firm’s orders, I shall be just as much beholden to you and Jim, sir, and shall feel a lot better myself.”

I knew what Bob meant; so did father, and we were glad enough to do what he asked, father insisting on making the seat price in the form of a present, after explaining to us that a foundation Stock Exchange rule prohibited an applicant from borrowing the seat price.  Four years after Bob Brownley entered the Stock Exchange he had paid back the forty thousand, with interest, and not only had a snug fifty thousand to his credit on Randolph & Randolph’s books, but was sending home six thousand a year while living up to, as he jokingly put it, “an honest man’s notch.”  I may say in passing, that a Wall Street man’s notch would make twice six thousand yearly earnings cast an uncertain shadow at Christmas time.  Bob was the favourite of the Exchange, as he had been the pet at school and at college, and had his hands full of business three hundred days in the year.  Besides Randolph & Randolph’s choicest commissions, he had the confidential orders of two of the heavy plunging cliques.

I had just passed my thirty-second birthday when my kind old dad suddenly died.  For the previous six years I had been getting ready for such an event; that is, I had grown accustomed to hearing my father say:  “Jim, don’t let any grass grow in getting the hang of every branch of our business, so that when anything happens to me there will be no disturbance in ‘the Street’ in regard to Randolph & Randolph’s affairs.  I want to let the world know as soon as possible that after I am gone our business will run as it always has.  So I will work you into my directorships in those companies where we have interests and gradually put you into my different trusteeships.”

Thus at father’s death there was not a ripple in our affairs and none of the stocks known as “The Randolph’s” fluttered a point because of that, to the financial world, momentous event.  I inherited all of father’s fortune other than four millions, which he divided up among relatives and charities, and took command of a business that gave me an income of two millions and a half a year.

Once more I begged Bob to come into the firm.

“Not yet, Jim,” he replied.  “I’ve got my seat and about a hundred thousand capital, and I want to feel that I’m free to kick my heels until I have raked together an even million all of my own making; then I’ll settle down with you, old man, and hold my handle of the plough, and if some good girl happens along about that time—­well, then it will be ’An ivy-covered little cot’ for mine.”