helped him.  His clients were for the most part widows and old maids, many of them resident abroad, for whom Guion, Maxwell & Guion had so long stood, in the matter of income, for the embodiment of paternal care that they were ready to believe anything and say anything and sign anything they were told to.  With the legal authorities to whom he owed account he had the advantage of the house’s high repute, making it possible to cover with formalities anything that might, strictly speaking, have called for investigation.  Whatever had to be considered shifty he excused to himself on the ground of its being temporary; while it was clearly, in his opinion, to the ultimate advantage of the Clay heirs and the Rodman heirs and the Compton heirs and all the other heirs for whom Guion, Maxwell & Guion were in loco parentis, that he should have a free hand.

The sequel astonished rather than disillusioned him.  It wrought in him disappointment with the human race, especially as represented by the Stock Exchange, without diminishing his confidence in his own judgment.  Through all his wild efforts not to sink he was upborne by the knowledge that it was not his calculations that were wrong, but the workings of a system more obscure than that of chance and more capricious than the weather.  He grew to consider it the fault of the blind forces that make up the social, financial, and commercial worlds, and not his own, when he was reduced to a frantic flinging of good money after bad as offering the sole chance of working out his redemption.

And, now that it was all over, he was glad his wife had not lived to see the end.  That, at least, had been spared him.  He stood before her portrait in the drawing-room—­the much-admired portrait by Carolus Duran—­and told her so.  She was so living as she looked down on him—­a suggestion of refined irony about the lips and eyes giving personality to the delicate oval of the face—­that he felt himself talking to her as they had been wont to talk together ever since their youth.  In his way he had stood in awe of her.  The assumption of prerogative—­an endowment of manner or of temperament, he was never quite sure which—­inherited by Olivia in turn, had been the dominating influence in their domestic life.  He had not been ruled by her—­the term would have been grotesque—­he had only made it his pleasure to carry out her wishes.  That her wishes led him on to spending money not his own was due to the fact, ever to be regretted, that his father had not bequeathed him money so much as the means of earning it.  She could not be held responsible for that, while she was the type of woman to whom it was something like an outrage not to offer the things befitting to her station.  There was no reproach in the look he lifted on her now—­nothing but a kind of dogged, perverse thankfulness that she should have had the way of life she craved, without ever knowing the price he was about to pay for it.