Three months of the six had now passed, and with each day I thought I noted an increasing anxiety in Bob.  He had opened a special account for Miss Sands on the books of the house in his name as agent, with a credit of sixty thousand dollars, and we both watched it with a painful tenseness of scrutiny.  It had grown by uneven jerks, until the balance on October 1st was almost four hundred thousand dollars.  On some of the trades Bob had consulted me, and on others, two in particular where he closed up after a few days’ operations with nearly two hundred thousand dollars profit, I did not even know what the trading was based on until the stocks had been sold.  Then he said: 

“Jim, that little lady from Virginia can give us a big handicap and play us to a standstill at our own game.  She told me to buy all the Burlington and Sugar her account would stand, and did not even ask for my opinion.  In both cases I thought the operations were more the result of a wakeful night and an I-must-do-something decision than anything else, and I tackled both with a shiver; but when she told me to sell them out at a time I thought they looked like going higher and the next day they slumped, I could not help thinking about the destiny that shapes our ends.”

On my part I tried to help.  On one occasion, without consulting her, I put her account in on a sure thing underwriting, wherein she stood to make a profit of a quarter of a million, but when Bob told her what I had done, she insisted with great dignity that her name be withdrawn.  After that neither of us dared help her to any short cuts.  Bob was deeply impressed by her principles, and, commenting on them, said:  “Jim, if all Wall Street had a code similar to Beulah Sands’s to hew to in their gambles, ours would be a fairer and more manly game, and many of the multi-millionaires would be clerking, while a lot of the hand-to-mouth traders would come downtown in a new auto every day in the week.  She does not believe in stock-gambling.  She has worked it out that every dollar one man makes, another loses; that the one who makes gives nothing in return for what he gets away with; and that the other fellow’s loss makes him and his as miserable as would robbery to the same amount.  Yet she realises that she must get back those millions stolen from her father and is willing to smother her conscience to attempt it, provided she takes no unfair advantage of the other players.  The other day she said to me, ’I have decided, because of my duty to my father, to put away my prejudice against gambling, but no duty to him or to any one can justify me in playing with marked cards.’  Jim, there is food for reflection for you and me, don’t you think so?”

I did not argue it with him, for, after that Saturday’s outburst, I had made up my mind to avoid stirring Bob up unnecessarily.  Also, I had to admit to myself that the things he had then said had raised some uncomfortable thoughts in me, thoughts that made me glance less confidently now and then at the old sign of Randolph & Randolph and at the big ledger which showed that I, an ordinary citizen of a free country, was the absolute possessor of more money than a hundred thousand of my fellow beings together could accumulate in a lifetime, although each one had worked harder, longer, more conscientiously, and with perhaps more ability than I.