“And is thee satisfied with it?”

“If thee means, if I have had enough of it, no.  I just begin to see what I can do in it, and what a noble profession it is for a woman.  Would thee have me sit here like a bird on a bough and wait for somebody to come and put me in a cage?”

Mr. Bolton was not sorry to divert the talk from his own affairs, and he did not think it worth while to tell his family of a performance that very day which was entirely characteristic of him.

Ruth might well say that she felt as if she were living in a house of cards, although the Bolton household had no idea of the number of perils that hovered over them, any more than thousands of families in America have of the business risks and contingences upon which their prosperity and luxury hang.

A sudden call upon Mr. Bolton for a large sum of money, which must be forthcoming at once, had found him in the midst of a dozen ventures, from no one of which a dollar could be realized.  It was in vain that he applied to his business acquaintances and friends; it was a period of sudden panic and no money.  “A hundred thousand!  Mr. Bolton,” said Plumly.  “Good God, if you should ask me for ten, I shouldn’t know where to get it.”

And yet that day Mr. Small (Pennybacker, Bigler and Small) came to Mr. Bolton with a piteous story of ruin in a coal operation, if he could not raise ten thousand dollars.  Only ten, and he was sure of a fortune.  Without it he was a beggar.  Mr. Bolton had already Small’s notes for a large amount in his safe, labeled “doubtful;” he had helped him again and again, and always with the same result.  But Mr. Small spoke with a faltering voice of his family, his daughter in school, his wife ignorant of his calamity, and drew such a picture of their agony, that Mr. Bolton put by his own more pressing necessity, and devoted the day to scraping together, here and there, ten thousand dollars for this brazen beggar, who had never kept a promise to him nor paid a debt.

Beautiful credit!  The foundation of modern society.  Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises?  That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark:—­“I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.”

CHAPTER XXVII.

It was a hard blow to poor Sellers to see the work on his darling enterprise stop, and the noise and bustle and confusion that had been such refreshment to his soul, sicken and die out.  It was hard to come down to humdrum ordinary life again after being a General Superintendent and the most conspicuous man in the community.  It was sad to see his name disappear from the newspapers; sadder still to see it resurrected at intervals, shorn of its aforetime gaudy gear of compliments and clothed on with rhetorical tar and feathers.