noted an increasing anxiety in Bob. He had opened a special account for
Miss Sands on the books of the house in his name as agent, with a credit
of sixty thousand dollars, and we both watched it with a painful tenseness
of scrutiny. It had grown by uneven jerks, until the balance on October
1st was almost four hundred thousand dollars. On some of the trades Bob
had consulted me, and on others, two in particular where he closed up
after a few days' operations with nearly two hundred thousand dollars
profit, I did not even know what the trading was based on until the stocks
had been sold. Then he said:

"Jim, that little lady from Virginia can give us a big handicap and play
us to a standstill at our own game. She told me to buy all the Burlington
and Sugar her account would stand, and did not even ask for my opinion. In
both cases I thought the operations were more the result of a wakeful
night and an I-must-do-something decision than anything else, and I
tackled both with a shiver; but when she told me to sell them out at a
time I thought they looked like going higher and the next day they
slumped, I could not help thinking about the destiny that shapes our
ends."

On my part I tried to help. On one occasion, without consulting her, I put
her account in on a sure thing underwriting, wherein she stood to make a
profit of a quarter of a million, but when Bob told her what I had done,
she insisted with great dignity that her name be withdrawn. After that
neither of us dared help her to any short cuts. Bob was deeply impressed
by her principles, and, commenting on them, said: "Jim, if all Wall Street
had a code similar to Beulah Sands's to hew to in their gambles, ours
would be a fairer and more manly game, and many of the multi-millionaires
would be clerking, while a lot of the hand-to-mouth traders would come
downtown in a new auto every day in the week. She does not believe in