I know is, there are two sides to everybody, and one’s always the business side.  The other may be anything.  Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad.  Sometimes it cares for a woman, sometimes it’s a collector of art things, Babylonian glass, and Etruscan toys and prehistoric dolls.  It may gamble, or drink, or teach a Sunday school, or read Dante, or shoot, or fish, or anything that’s of no use.  But one side’s always the business side.  That’s certain.’

Mr. Van Torp paused, and looked at his companion’s empty cup.  Seeing that he was going to get up in order to give her more, she herself rose quickly and did it for herself.  He sat still and watched her, probably because the business side of his nature judged that he could be of no use.  The fur-lined cloak was now lying in the easy-chair, and there was nothing to break the sweeping lines of the black velvet from her dazzling shoulders to her waist, to her knee, to her feet.  Mr. Van Torp watched her in silence, till she sat down again.

‘You know me well enough to understand that,’ he said, going on.  ’My outside’s my business side, and that’s what matters most.  Now the plain truth is this.  My engagement to Miss Bamberger was just a business affair.  Bamberger thought of it first, and suggested it to me, and he asked her if she’d mind being engaged to me for a few weeks; and she said she wouldn’t provided she wasn’t expected to marry me.  That was fair and square, anyway, on both sides.  Wasn’t it?’

‘It depends on why you did it,’ said the lady, going to the point directly.

‘That was the business side,’ answered her companion.  ’You see, a big thing like the Nickel Trust always has a lot of enemies, besides a heap of people who want to get some of it cheap.  This time they put their heads together and got up one of the usual stories.  You see, Isidore H. Bamberger is the president and I only appear as a director, though most of it’s mine.  So they got up a story that he was operating on his own account to get behind me, and that we were going to quarrel over it, and there was going to be a slump, and people began to believe it.  It wasn’t any use talking to the papers.  We soon found that out.  Sometimes the public won’t believe anything it’s told, and sometimes it swallows faster than you can feed to it.  I don’t know why, though I’ve had a pretty long experience, but I generally do know which state it’s in.  I feel it.  That’s what’s called business ability.  It’s like fishing.  Any old fisherman can judge in half an hour whether the fish are going to bite all day or not.  If he’s wrong once, he’ll be right a hundred times.  Well, I felt talking was no good, and so did Bamberger, and the shares began to go down before the storm.  If the big slump had come there’d have been a heap of money lost.  I don’t say we didn’t let the shares drop a couple of points further than they needed to, and Bamberger bought any of it that happened to be lying around, and the more he bought the quicker it wanted to go down, because people said there was going to be trouble and an investigation.  But if we’d gone on, lots of people would have been ruined, and yet we didn’t just see how to stop it sharp, till Bamberger started his scheme.  Do you understand all that?’