“The Street” knew Bob had married the daughter of Judge Lee Sands, the victim of Tom Reinhart’s cold-blooded Seaboard Air Line deal.  Otherwise it knew nothing of the affair.  His friends never met his wife.  Occasionally they would pass the Brownley carriage on the avenue or in the park and, taking it for granted that the beautiful woman was Mrs. Brownley, they thought Bob a lucky fellow.  It seemed quite natural that his wife should choose seclusion after the awful tragedy at her home in Virginia.  But they could not understand why, with such cause for mourning, the exquisite figure beside Bob in the victoria should always be garbed in gray.  After a while it was whispered that there was something wrong in Bob’s household.  Then his friends and acquaintances ceased to whisper or to think of his affairs.  With all New York’s bad points—­and they are as plentiful as her church spires and charity bazaars—­she has one offsetting virtue.  If a dweller in her midst chooses to let New York alone, New York is willing to reciprocate.  In her most crowded fashionable districts a person may come and go for a lifetime, and none in the block in which he dwells will know when his coming and going ceases.  When a New Yorker reads in his newspaper of the man who lives next door to him, “murdered and his body discovered by the gas man” or the tax collector, the butcher or the baker, as the case may be, he never thinks he may have been remiss in his neighbourly duties.  There is no such word as “neighbour” in the New York City dictionary.  It may have been there once, but, if so, it was long ago used as a stake for the barbed-wire fence of exclusive keep-your-distance-we-keep-our-distance-until-we-know-younes
s.  It is told of a minister from the rural districts, an old-fashioned American, who came to New York to take charge of a parish, that he started out to make his calls and was seized in the hall of what in civilisation would have been his next-door neighbour.  He was rushed away to Bellevue for examination as to sanity.  The verdict was:  “Insane.  Had no letter of introduction and was not in the set.”

Shortly after the first anniversary of his wedding Bob gave up his office with Randolph & Randolph and opened one for himself.  He explained that he was giving up his commission business to devote all his time to personal trading.  With the opening of his new office he again became the most active man on the floor.  His trading was intermittent.  For weeks he would not be seen at the Exchange or on “the Street.”  Then he would return and, after executing a series of brilliant trades, which were invariably successful, he would again disappear.  He soon became known as the luckiest operator in Wall Street, and the beginning of his every new deal was the signal for his fast-growing following to tag on.

From time to time I learned that Beulah Sands was making no real improvement, though in some details she had learned as a child learns.  But there was no indication that she would ever regain her lost mind.