Mr. Spragg listened thoughtfully to Ralph’s statement of the case, growling out here and there a tentative correction, and turning his cigar between his lips as he seemed to turn the problem over in the loose grasp of his mind.

“Well, what’s the trouble with it?” he asked at length, stretching his big square-toed shoes against the grate of his son-in-law’s dining-room, where, in the after-dinner privacy of a family evening, Ralph had seized the occasion to consult him.

“The trouble?” Ralph considered.  “Why, that’s just what I should like you to explain to me.”

Mr. Spragg threw back his head and stared at the garlanded French clock on the chimney-piece.  Mrs. Spragg was sitting upstairs in her daughter’s bedroom, and the silence of the house seemed to hang about the two men like a listening presence.

“Well, I dunno but what I agree with the doctor who said there warn’t any diseases, but only sick people.  Every case is different, I guess.”  Mr. Spragg, munching his cigar, turned a ruminating glance on Ralph.  “Seems to me it all boils down to one thing.  Was this fellow we’re supposing about under any obligation to the other party—­the one he was trying to buy the property from?”

Ralph hesitated.  “Only the obligation recognized between decent men to deal with each other decently.”  Mr. Spragg listened to this with the suffering air of a teacher compelled to simplify upon his simplest questions.

“Any personal obligation, I meant.  Had the other fellow done him a good turn any time?”

“No—­I don’t imagine them to have had any previous relations at all.”

His father-in-law stared.  “Where’s your trouble, then?” He sat for a moment frowning at the embers.  “Even when it’s the other way round it ain’t always so easy to decide how far that kind of thing’s binding... and they say shipwrecked fellows’ll make a meal of friend as quick as they would of a total stranger.”  He drew himself together with a shake of his shoulders and pulled back his feet from the grate.  “But I don’t see the conundrum in your case, I guess it’s up to both parties to take care of their own skins.”

He rose from his chair and wandered upstairs to Undine.

That was the Wall Street code:  it all “boiled down” to the personal obligation, to the salt eaten in the enemy’s tent.  Ralph’s fancy wandered off on a long trail of speculation from which he was pulled back with a jerk by the need of immediate action.  Moffatt’s “deal” could not wait:  quick decisions were essential to effective action, and brooding over ethical shades of difference might work more ill than good in a world committed to swift adjustments.  The arrival of several unforeseen bills confirmed this view, and once Ralph had adopted it he began to take a detached interest in the affair.