Free The Driver by Garet Garrett Page B

silence to the next light where she turned and gave me a frankly inquisitive look.
    “Oh,” she said.
    “Oh, what?” said I. “You don’t remember me.”
    “Nothing,” she answered, giving me a second look, glancewise. “Two nothings make it even,” she added.
    There was an awkward pause. “May I ask you something? You are with the Great Midwestern, in Mr. Valentine’s office?”
    “Yes.”
    “I have no one else to ask,” she said. “You will be surprised. It is this: do you think Great Midwestern stock a good investment?”
    I was angry and uncomfortable. Why was she asking me? But she wasn’t really; she was coming at something else.
    “I haven’t any opinion,” I said, “and that isn’t what you mean.”
    We were now in Fifth Avenue and had stopped in the doorway of a lighted shop to be out of the rain. She blushed at my answer and at the same time gave me a look of scrutiny. I had to admire the way she held to her purpose.
    “I am very anxious to know what Mr. Valentine’s opinion is,” she said.
    “That’s better,” I replied. “But why should you want even his opinion? Your father knows more about Great Midwestern than its president, more than any other one person. Why not get his opinion?”
    Until that moment she had perfectly disguised a state of anxiety verging upon hysteria. Suddenly her powers of self-repression failed. My reference to her father caused the strings to snap. Her expression changed as if a mask had fallen. The grief muscles all at once relaxed and the pretty frown they had been holding in the forehead disappeared. Her eyes flamed. Her upper lip retracted on one side, showing the canine tooth. Her giving way to strong emotion in this manner was a kind of pagan revelation. It did not in the least distort her beauty, but made it terrible. This, as I learned in time, was the only one of her effects of which she was altogether unconscious.
    “We know his opinion,” she said. “We take it with our food. He is putting everything we have into Great Midwestern stock,—his own money, the family’s money, mother’s, Natalie’s, gram’ma’s and now mine.”
    “Without your consent? I don’t understand it,” I said.
    “The money in our family is divided. Each of us has a little. Most of it is from mother’s side of the house. My father and gram’ma are trustees of a sum that will come to me from my uncle’s estate when I am twenty-one. It is enough to make me independent for life. They are putting that into this stock! Is it a proper investment for trust funds, I ask you?”
    I felt I ought not to be listening. Still, I had not encouraged these intimate disclosures, she was old enough to know what she was doing, and, most of all, the information was dramatically interesting. I was obliged to say that by all the rules Great Midwestern stock would not be considered a proper investment for trust funds.
    “I’ve protested,” she said. “I’ve threatened to take steps. Pooh! What can I do? They pay no more attention to me than that! Neither father nor gram’ma. Mother is neutral. Father says it will make me rich. I don’t want to be rich. Besides he has said that before.”
    “It may turn out well,” I said.
    “It isn’t as if this were the first time,” she continued. “Twice he. has had us on the rocks. Twice he has lost all our money, all that he could get his hands on, in the same way, putting it into a railroad that he hoped to get control of or something, and going smash at the end. Once when I was a little girl and again three years ago. To-day on the train I heard two men talking about a receivership for the Great Midwestern as if it were inevitable. What would that mean?”
    “It would be very disagreeable,” I said.
    “That’s almost the same as bankruptcy, isn’t it?”
    “It is bankruptcy,” I said; but I added that rumors just then were very wild in Wall Street and so false in general that the worse they were the less they were heeded,