"I'll think it over," said I. He thought I meant that I'd think over
dropping my power--thought I was as big a snob as he and his friends of the
Travelers, willing to make any sacrifice to be "in the push." But, while
Matthew Blacklock has the streak of snob in him that's natural to all
human beings and to most animals, he is not quite insane. No, the thing
I intended to think over was how to stay in the "bucket-shop" business,
but wash myself of its odium. Bucket-shop! What snobbery! Yet it's human
nature, too. The wholesale merchant looks down on the retailer, the big
retailer on the little; the burglar despises the pickpocket; the financier,
the small promoter; the man who works with his brain, the man who works
with his hands. A silly lot we are--silly to look down, sillier to feel
badly when we're looked down upon.




VI

OF "GENTLEMEN"


When I got back to my office and was settling I to the proofs of the
"Letter to Investors," which I published in sixty newspapers throughout the
country and which daily reached upward of five million people, Sam Ellersly
came in. His manner was certainly different from what it had ever been
before; a difference so subtle that I couldn't describe it more nearly than
to say it made me feel as if he had not until then been treating me as of
the same class with himself. I smiled to myself and made an entry in my
mental ledger to the credit of Mowbray Langdon.