Three days.  Then came events!  Things had taken a happy turn, and for forty-eight hours Aleck’s imaginary corner had been booming.  Up—­up—­still up!  Cost point was passed.  Still up—­and up —­and up!  Cost point was passed.  STill up—­and up—­and up!  Five points above cost—­then ten—­fifteen—­twenty!  Twenty points cold profit on the vast venture, now, and Aleck’s imaginary brokers were shouting frantically by imaginary long-distance, “Sell! sell! for Heaven’s sake sell!”

She broke the splendid news to Sally, and he, too, said, “Sell! sell—­oh, don’t make a blunder, now, you own the earth! —­sell, sell!” But she set her iron will and lashed it amidships, and said she would hold on for five points more if she died for it.

It was a fatal resolve.  The very next day came the historic crash, the record crash, the devastating crash, when the bottom fell out of Wall Street, and the whole body of gilt-edged stocks dropped ninety-five points in five hours, and the multimillionaire was seen begging his bread in the Bowery.  Aleck sternly held her grip and “put up” as long as she could, but at last there came a call which she was powerless to meet, and her imaginary brokers sold her out.  Then, and not till then, the man in her was vanished, and the woman in her resumed sway.  She put her arms about her husband’s neck and wept, saying: 

“I am to blame, do not forgive me, I cannot bear it.  We are paupers!  Paupers, and I am so miserable.  The weddings will never come off; all that is past; we could not even buy the dentist, now.”

A bitter reproach was on Sally’s tongue:  “I begged you to sell, but you—­” He did not say it; he had not the heart to add a hurt to that broken and repentant spirit.  A nobler thought came to him and he said: 

“Bear up, my Aleck, all is not lost!  You really never invested a penny of my uncle’s bequest, but only its unmaterialized future; what we have lost was only the incremented harvest from that future by your incomparable financial judgment and sagacity.  Cheer up, banish these griefs; we still have the thirty thousand untouched; and with the experience which you have acquired, think what you will be able to do with it in a couple years!  The marriages are not off, they are only postponed.”

These are blessed words.  Aleck saw how true they were, and their influence was electric; her tears ceased to flow, and her great spirit rose to its full stature again.  With flashing eye and grateful heart, and with hand uplifted in pledge and prophecy, she said: 

“Now and here I proclaim—­”