but Bailey's newly found freedom was also a factor in the developments
of the firm's operations. If you keep a dog, a dog with a high sense of
his abilities and importance, tied up and muzzled for a length of time
and then abruptly set it free the chances are that it will celebrate
its freedom. This had happened in the case of Bailey.
Just as her father's money had caused Ruth to plunge into a whirl of
pleasures which she did not really enjoy, merely for the novelty of it,
so the death of John Bannister and his own consequent accession to the
throne had upset Bailey's balance and embarked him on an orgy of
speculation quite foreign to his true nature. All their lives Ruth and
Bailey had been repressed by their father, and his removal had
unsteadied them.
Bailey, on whom the shadow of the dead man had pressed particularly
severely, had been quite intoxicated by sudden freedom. He had been a
cipher in the firm of Bannister & Son. In the firm of Bannister & Co.
he was an untrammelled despot. He did that which was right in his own
eyes, and there was no one to say him nay.
It was true that veteran members of the firm, looking in the glass,
found white hairs where no white hairs had been and wrinkles on
foreheads which, under the solid rule of old John Bannister, had been
smooth; but it would have taken more than these straws to convince
Bailey that the wind which was blowing was an ill-wind. He had
developed in a day the sublime self-confidence of a young Napoleon. He
was all dash and enterprise, the hurricane fighter of Wall Street.
With these private interests to occupy him, it is surprising that he
should have found time to take the affairs of Ruth and Kirk in hand.
But he did.
For some time he had watched the widening gulf between them with pained
solicitude. He disliked Kirk personally; but that did not influence
him. He conceived it to be his duty to suppress private prejudices.
Duty seemed to call him to go to Kirk's aid and smooth out his domestic
difficulties.
What urged him to this course more than anything else was Ruth's
growing intimacy with Basil Milbank; for, in the period which had
elapsed since the conversation recorded earlier in the story, when Kirk
had first made the other's acquaintance, the gifted Basil had become a
very important and menacing figure in Ruth's life.
To Ruth, as to most women, his gifts were his attraction. He danced
well; he talked well; he did everything well. He appealed to a side of
Ruth's nature which Kirk scarcely touched, a side which had only come
into prominence in the last year.
His manner was admirable. He suggested sympathy without expressing it.
He could convey to Ruth that he thought her a misunderstood and
neglected wife while talking to her about the weather. He could make
his own knight-errant attitude toward her perfectly plain without
saying a word, merely by playing soft music to her on the piano; for he
had the gift of saying more with his finger-tips than most men could
have said in a long speech carefully rehearsed.
Kirk's inability to accompany Ruth into her present life had given
Basil his chance. Into the gap which now lay between them he had
