“Oh, Mr. Mollenhauer,” he choked, beginning to cry, “I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.  Strobik and Wycroft told me it was all right.  You sent me to Cowperwood in the first place.  I only did what I thought the others had been doing.  Mr. Bode did it, just like I have been doing.  He dealt with Tighe and Company.  I have a wife and four children, Mr. Mollenhauer.  My youngest boy is only seven years old.  Think of them, Mr. Mollenhauer!  Think of what my arrest will mean to them!  I don’t want to go to jail.  I didn’t think I was doing anything very wrong—­honestly I didn’t.  I’ll give up all I’ve got.  You can have all my stocks and houses and lots—­anything—­if you’ll only get me out of this.  You won’t let ’em send me to jail, will you?”

His fat, white lips were trembling—­wabbling nervously—­and big hot tears were coursing down his previously pale but now flushed cheeks.  He presented one of those almost unbelievable pictures which are yet so intensely human and so true.  If only the great financial and political giants would for once accurately reveal the details of their lives!

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 here, self-convicted of sin, pleading to him, Mollenhauer, as he would to a righteous, unstained saint.  As a matter of fact, Mollenhauer knew that he was simply shrewder, more far-seeing, more calculating, not less dishonest.  Stener was lacking in force and brains—­not morals.  This lack was his principal crime.  There were people who believed in some esoteric standard of right—­some ideal of conduct absolutely and very far removed from practical life; but he had never seen them practice it save to their own financial (not moral—­he would not say that) destruction.  They were never significant, practical men who clung to these fatuous ideals.  They were always poor, nondescript, negligible dreamers.  He could not have made Stener understand all this if he had wanted to, and he certainly did not want to.  It was too bad about Mrs. Stener and the little Steners.  No doubt she had worked hard, as had Stener, to get up in the world and be something—­just a little more than miserably poor; and now this unfortunate complication had to arise to undo them—­this Chicago fire.  What a curious thing that was!  If any one thing more than another made him doubt the existence of a kindly, overruling Providence, it was the unheralded storms out of clear skies—­financial, social, anything you choose—­that so often brought ruin and disaster to so many.