carried on in there . . . "

"Come, Marlow," I said, "you exaggerate surely--if only by your way of
putting things. It's too startling."

"I exaggerate!" he defended himself. "My way of putting things! My dear
fellow I have merely stripped the rags of business verbiage and financial
jargon off my statements. And you are startled! I am giving you the
naked truth. It's true too that nothing lays itself open to the charge
of exaggeration more than the language of naked truth. What comes with a
shock is admitted with difficulty. But what will you say to the end of
his career?

It was of course sensational and tolerably sudden. It began with the Orb
Deposit Bank. Under the name of that institution de Barral with the
frantic obstinacy of an unimaginative man had been financing an Indian
prince who was prosecuting a claim for immense sums of money against the
government. It was an enormous number of scores of lakhs--a miserable
remnant of his ancestors' treasures--that sort of thing. And it was all
authentic enough. There was a real prince; and the claim too was
sufficiently real--only unfortunately it was not a valid claim. So the
prince lost his case on the last appeal and the beginning of de Barral's
end became manifest to the public in the shape of a half-sheet of note
paper wafered by the four corners on the closed door of The Orb offices
notifying that payment was stopped at that establishment.

Its consort The Sceptre collapsed within the week. I won't say in
American parlance that suddenly the bottom fell out of the whole of de
Barral concerns. There never had been any bottom to it. It was like the
cask of Danaides into which the public had been pleased to pour its