Purpose with tremendous strength, and they would persist and persist
and persist, unswerving, unwavering, untiring, till the Purpose was
driven home. And the two long, lean, fibrous arms of him; what a
reach they could attain, and how wide and huge and even formidable
would be their embrace of affairs. One of those great manoeuvres of
a fellow money-captain had that very day been concluded, the Helmick
failure, and between the chords and bars of a famous opera men
talked in excited whispers, and one great leader lay at that very
moment, broken and spent, fighting with his last breath for bare
existence. Jadwin had seen it all. Uninvolved in the crash, he had
none the less been close to it, watching it, in touch with it,
foreseeing each successive collapse by which it reeled fatally to
the final catastrophe. The voices of the two men that had so annoyed
her in the early part of the evening were suddenly raised again:

"--It was terrific, there on the floor of the Board this morning.
By the Lord! they fought each other when the Bears began throwing
the grain at 'em--in carload lots."

And abruptly, midway between two phases of that music-drama, of
passion and romance, there came to Laura the swift and vivid
impression of that other drama that simultaneously--even at that
very moment--was working itself out close at hand, equally
picturesque, equally romantic, equally passionate; but more than
that, real, actual, modern, a thing in the very heart of the very
life in which she moved. And here he sat, this Jadwin, quiet, in
evening dress, listening good-naturedly to this beautiful music, for
which he did not care, to this rant and fustian, watching quietly
all this posing and attitudinising. How small and petty it must all
seem to him!