We can understand now why Mr. Ault read the accounts of the Mavick ball with a grim smile.  In speaking of it he used the vulgar term “splurge,” a word especially offensive to the refined society in which the Mavicks had gained a foothold.  And yet the word was on the lips of a great many men on the Street.  The shifting application of sympathy is a very queer thing in this world.  Mr. Ault was not a snob.  Whatever else he was, he made few pretensions.  In his first advent he had been resisted as an intruder and shunned as a vulgarian; but in time respect for his force and luck mingled with fear of his reckless talent, and in the course of events it began to be admitted that the rough diamond was being polished into one of the corner-stones of the great business edifice.  At the time of this writing he did not altogether lack the sympathy of the Street, and an increasing number of people were not sorry to see Mr. Mavick get the worst of it in repeated trials of strength.  And in each of these trials it became increasingly difficult for Mr. Mavick to obtain the assistance and the credit which are often indispensable to the strongest men in a panic.

The truth was that there were many men in the Street who were not sorry to see Mr. Mavick worried.  They remembered perfectly well the omniscient snobbishness of Thomas Mavick when he held a position in the State Department at Washington and was at the same time a secret agent of Rodney Henderson.  They did not change their opinion of him when, by his alliance with Mrs. Henderson, he stepped into control of Mr. Henderson’s property and obtained the mission to Rome; but later on he had been accepted as one of the powers in the financial world.  There were a few of the old stagers who never trusted him.  Uncle Jerry Hollowell, for instance, used to say, “Mavick is smart, smart as lightnin’; I guess he’ll make ducks and drakes of the Henderson property.”  They are very superficial observers of Wall Street who think that character does not tell there.  Mr. Mavick may have realized that when in his straits he looked around for assistance.

The history of this panic summer in New York would not be worthy the reader’s attention were not the fortunes of some of his acquaintances involved in it.  It was not more intense than the usual panics, but it lasted longer on account of the complications with uncertain government policy, and it produced stagnation in social as well as business circles.  So quiet a place as Rivervale felt it in the diminution of city visitors, and the great resorts showed it in increased civility to the small number of guests.

The summer at Newport, which had not been distinguished by many great events, was drawing to a close—­that is, it was in the period when those who really loved the charming promenade which is so loved of the sea began to enjoy themselves, and those who indulge in the pleasures of hope, based upon a comfortable matrimonial establishment, are reckoning up the results of the campaign.