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Cynthia had a cousin in Wall Street; his name was Jarrocks Bell. He was twenty years older than Cynthia and he had been fond of her ever since she was born. He was a great, big, good-looking man, gruff without and tender within. Clever people, who hadn’t made successful brokers, wondered how in the face of what they called his “obvious stupidity” Jarrocks Bell had managed to grow rich in Wall Street. The answer was obvious enough to any one who knew him intimately. To begin with, his stupidity was superficial. In the second place, he had studied bonds and stocks until he knew a great deal about them. Then, though a drinking man, he had a head like iron and was never moved by exhilaration to mention his own or anybody else’s affairs. Furthermore, he was unscrupulously honest. He was so honest and blunt that people thought him brutal at times. Last and not least among the elements of his success was the fact that he himself never speculated.

When the big men found out that there was in Wall Street a broker who didn’t speculate himself, who didn’t drink to excess, who was absolutely honest, and who never opened his mouth when it was better shut, they began to patronize that man’s firm. In short, the moment Jarrocks Bell’s qualities were discovered, Jarrocks Bell was made. So that now, in speculative years, his profits were enormous.

Cynthia had always been fond of her big, blunt cousin, as he of her; and in her present trouble her thoughts flew to him as straight as a homing aeroplane to the landing-stage.

Even a respectable broker’s office is a noisome, embarrassing place, and among the clients are men whose eyes have become popped from staring at paper-tapes and pretty girls; but Cynthia had no more fear of men than a farmer’s daughter has of cows, and she flashed through Jarrocks’s outer office–preceded by a very small boy–with her color unchanged and only her head a little higher than usual.

Jarrocks must have wondered to the point of vulgar curiosity what the deuce had brought Cynthia to see him in the busiest hour of a very busy day; but he said “Hello, Cynthia!” as naturally as if they two had been visiting in the same house and he had come face to face with her for the third or fourth time that morning.

“I suppose,” said Cynthia, “that you are dreadfully busy; but, Jarrocks dear, my affairs are so much more important to me than yours can possibly be to you–do you mind?”

“May I smoke?”

“Of course.”

“Then I don’t mind. What’s your affair, Cynthia–money or the heart?”

“Both, Jarrocks.” And she told him pretty much what the reader has already learned. As for Jarrocks’s listening, he was a perfect study of himself. He laughed gruffly when he ought to have cried; and when Cynthia tried to be a little humorous he looked very solemn and not unlike the big bronze Buddha of the Japanese. Inside, however, his big heart was full of compassion and tenderness for his favorite girl in all the world. Nobody will ever know just how fond Jarrocks was of Cynthia. It was one of those matters on which–owing, perhaps, to his being her senior by twenty years–he had always thought it best to keep his mouth shut.

“What’s your plan?” he asked. “Where do I come in? I’ll give you anything I’ve got.” Cynthia waived the offer; it was a little unwelcome.

“I’ve got about five hundred dollars,” she said, “and I want to speculate with it and make a lot of money, so that I can be independent of papa and mamma.”

“Lots of people,” said Jarrocks, “come to Wall Street with five hundred dollars, more or less, and they wish to be independent of papa and mamma. They end up by going to live in the Mills Hotel.”

“I know,” said Cynthia; “but this is really important. If G. G. could work it would be different.”