“Oh, that is keeping up the circulation, preventing stagnation.”

“And that is the use of brokers in grain and stocks?”

“Partly.  They are commonly the agents that others use to keep themselves from stagnation.”

“I cannot see any good in it,” Margaret persisted.  “No one seems to have the things he buys or sells.  I don’t understand it.”

“That is because you are a woman, if you will pardon me for saying it.  Men don’t need to have things in hand; business is done on faith and credit, and when a transaction is over, they settle up and pay the difference, without the trouble of transporting things back and forth.”

“I know you are chaffing me, Mr. Morgan.  But I should call that betting.”

“Oh, there is a risk in everything you do.  But you see it is really paying for a difference of knowledge or opinion.”

“Would you buy stocks that way?”

“What way?”

“Why, agreeing to pay for your difference of opinion, as you call it, not really having any stock at all.”

“I never did.  But I have bought stocks and sold them pretty soon, if I could make anything by the sale.  All merchants act on that principle.”

“Well,” said Margaret, dimly seeing the sophistry of this, “I don’t understand business morality.”

“Nobody does, Margaret.  Most men go by the law.  The Golden Rule seems to be suspended by a more than two-thirds vote.”

It was by such inquiries, leading to many talks of this sort, that Margaret was groping in her mind for the solution of what might become to her a personal question.  Consciously she did not doubt Henderson’s integrity or his honor, but she was perplexed about the world of which she had recently had a glimpse, and it was impossible to separate him from it.  Subjected to an absolutely new experience, stirred as her heart had never been before by any man—­a fact which at once irritated and pleased her—­she was following the law of her own nature, while she was still her own mistress, to ponder these things and to bring her reason to the guidance of her feeling.  And it is probable that she did not at all know the strength of her feeling, or have any conception of the real power of love, and how little the head has to do with the great passion of life, the intensity of which the poets have never in the least exaggerated.  If she thought of Mr. Lyon occasionally, of his white face and pitiful look of suffering that day, she could not, after all, make it real or permanently serious.  Indeed, she was sure that no emotion could so master her.  And yet she looked forward to Henderson’s coming with a sort of nervous apprehension, amounting almost to dread.

XI

It was the susceptible time of the year for plants, for birds, for maids:  all innocent natural impulses respond to the subtle influence of spring.  One may well gauge his advance in selfishness, worldliness, and sin by his loss of this annual susceptibility, by the failure of this sweet appeal to touch his heart.  One must be very far gone if some note of it does not for a moment bring back the tenderest recollections of the days of joyous innocence.