That afternoon we had a scene, and late that night another.  The memory of the former is a little blotted out.  Things began to move so quickly that, try as I will to arrange their sequence in my mind, I cannot.  I cannot even very distinctly remember what she told me at that first explanation.  I must have attacked her fiercely—­on the score of de Mersch, in the old vein; must have told her that I would not in the interest of the name allow her to see the man again.  She told me things, too, rather abominable things, about the way in which she had got Halderschrodt into her power and was pressing him down.  Halderschrodt was de Mersch’s banker-in-chief; his fall would mean de Mersch’s, and so on.  The “so on” in this case meant a great deal more.  Halderschrodt, apparently, was the “somebody who was up to something” of the American paper—­that is to say the allied firms that Halderschrodt represented.  I can’t remember the details.  They were too huge and too unfamiliar, and I was too agitated by my own share in the humanity of it.  But, in sum, it seemed that the fall of Halderschrodt would mean a sort of incredibly vast Black Monday—­a frightful thing in the existing state of public confidence, but one which did not mean much to me.  I forget how she said she had been able to put the screw on him.  Halderschrodt, as you must remember, was the third of his colossal name, a man without much genius and conscious of the lack, obsessed with the idea of operating some enormous coup, like the founder of his dynasty, something in which foresight in international occurrence played a chief part.  That idea was his weakness, the defect of his mind, and she had played on that weakness.  I forget, I say, the details, if I ever heard them; they concerned themselves with a dynastic revolution somewhere, a revolution that was to cause a slump all over the world, and that had been engineered in our Salon.  And she had burked the revolution—­betrayed it, I suppose—­and the consequences did not ensue, and Halderschrodt and all the rest of them were left high and dry.

The whole thing was a matter of under-currents that never came to the surface, a matter of shifting sands from which only those with the clearest heads could come forth.

“And we ... we have clear heads,” she said.  It was impossible to listen to her without shuddering.  For me, if he stood for anything, Halderschrodt stood for stability; there was the tremendous name, and there was the person I had just seen, the person on whom a habit of mind approaching almost to the royal had conferred a presence that had some of the divinity that hedges a king.  It seemed frightful merely to imagine his ignominious collapse; as frightful as if she had pointed out a splendid-limbed man and said:  “That man will be dead in five minutes.”  That, indeed, was what she said of Halderschrodt....  The man had saluted her, going to his death; the austere inclination that I had seen had been the salutation of such a man.