Given the control of a few thousands as a point of departure, and the
financial ebb and flow, a man must be a born fool, he said, not to be
able to make a reasonable fortune with reasonable speed.

Within the office of Guion, Maxwell & Guion circumstances favored the
accession to power of the younger partner, who had hitherto played an
acquiescent rather than an active part. Mr. Maxwell was old and ailing,
though neither so ailing nor so old as to be blind to the need of new
blood, new money, and new influence in the fine old firm. His weakness
was that he hated beginning all over again with new men; so that when
Smith and Jones were proposed as possible partners he easily admitted
whatever objections Guion raised to them, and the matter was postponed.
It was postponed again. It slipped into a chronic condition of
postponement; and Mr. Maxwell died.

The situation calling then for adroitness on Guion's part, the fact that
he was able to meet it to the satisfaction of all the parties concerned,
increased his confidence in his own astuteness. True, it required some
manipulation, some throwing of dust into people's eyes, some making of
explanations to one person that could not be reconciled with those made
to another; but here again the circumstances helped him. His clients
were for the most part widows and old maids, many of them resident
abroad, for whom Guion, Maxwell & Guion had so long stood, in the matter
of income, for the embodiment of paternal care that they were ready to
believe anything and say anything and sign anything they were told to.
With the legal authorities to whom he owed account he had the advantage
of the house's high repute, making it possible to cover with formalities
anything that might, strictly speaking, have called for investigation.
Whatever had to be considered shifty he excused to himself on the ground
of its being temporary; while it was clearly, in his opinion, to the