The fortune left by his grandfather, who had been one of those chieftains on
the smaller scale of his day, had descended to him with accretion through his
father, who during a long life had quietly continued to lend money and never
had margined a stock. Manderson, who had at no time known what it was to be
without large sums to his hand, should have been altogether of that newer
American plutocracy which is steadied by the tradition and habit of great
wealth. But it was not so. While his nurture and education had taught him
European ideas of a rich man's proper external circumstance; while they had
rooted in him an instinct for quiet magnificence, the larger costliness which
does not shriek of itself with a thousand tongues; there had been handed on to
him nevertheless much of the Forty-Niner and financial buccaneer, his forbear.
During that first period of his business career which had been called his
early bad manner, he had been little more than a gambler of genius, his hand
against every man's--an infant prodigy- who brought to the enthralling pursuit
of speculation a brain better endowed than any opposed to it. At St Helena it
was laid down that war is une belle occupation; and so the young Manderson had
found the multitudinous and complicated dog-fight of the Stock Exchange of New
York.

Then came his change. At his father's death, when Manderson was thirty years
old, some new revelation of the power and the glory of the god he served
seemed to have come upon him. With the sudden, elastic adaptability of his
nation he turned to steady labour in his father's banking business, closing
his ears to the sound of the battles of the Street. In a few years he came to
control all the activity of the great firm whose unimpeached conservatism,
safety, and financial weight lifted it like a cliff above the angry sea of the
markets. All mistrust founded on the performances of his youth had vanished.
He was quite plainly a different man. How the change came about none could
with authority say, but there was a story of certain last words spoken by his