He was a tallish, slim man, carefully dressed, with a bored, weary look and a slow, bored way of talking. I had always said that if I had not been myself I should have wished to be Langdon. Men liked and admired him; women loved and ran after him. Yet he exerted not the slightest effort to please any one; on the contrary, he made it distinct and clear that he didn't care a rap what any one thought of him or, for that matter, of anybody or anything. He knew how to get, without sweat or snatching, all the good there was in whatever fate threw in his way—and he was one of those men into whose way fate seems to strive to put everything worth       having. His business judgment was shrewd, but he cared nothing for the big game he was playing except as a game. Like myself, he was simply a sportsman—and, I think, that is why we liked each other. He could have trusted almost any one that came into contact with him; but he trusted nobody, and frankly warned every one not to trust him—a safe frankness, for his charm caused it to be forgotten or ignored. He would do anything to gain an object, however trivial, which chanced to attract him; once it was his, he would throw it aside as carelessly as an ill-fitting collar.     

       His expression, as he came into my office, was one of cynical amusement, as if he were saying to himself: “Our friend Blacklock has caught the swollen head at last.” Not a suggestion of ill humor, of resentment at my impertinence—for, in the circumstances, I had been guilty of an impertinence. Just languid, amused patience with the frailty of a friend.       “I see,” said he, “that you have got Textile up to eighty-five.”      

       He was the head of the Textile Trust which had been built by his brother-in-law and had fallen to him in the confusion following his brother-in-law's death. As he was just then needing some money for his share in the National Coal undertaking, he had directed me to push Textile up toward par and unload him of two or three hundred thousand shares—he, of course, to repurchase the shares after he had taken profits and Textile had dropped back to its normal fifty.     

       “I'll have it up to ninety-eight by the middle of next month,” said I.       “And there I think we'd better stop.”      

       “Stop at about ninety,” said he. “That will give me all I find I'll need for this Coal business. I don't want to be bothered with hunting up an     

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