“That's true enough,” he confessed. “But there are enterprises and enterprises, you know.”      

       “You can tell 'em, Sam,” said I, “that I never put out a statement I don't believe to be true, and that when any of my followers lose on one of my tips, I've lost on it, too. For I play my own tips—and that's more than can be said of any 'financier' in this town.”      

       “It'd be no use to tell 'em that,” said he. “Character's something of a consideration in social matters, of course. But it isn't the chief consideration by a long shot, and the absence of it isn't necessarily fatal.”      

       “I'm the biggest single operator in the country,” I went on. “And it's my methods that give me success—because I know how to advertise—how to keep my name before the country, and how to make men say, whenever they hear it: 'There's a shrewd, honest fellow.' That and the people it brings me, in flocks, are my stock in trade. Honesty's a bluff with most of the big respectables; under cover of their respectability, of their 'old and honored names,' of their social connections, of their church-going and that, they do all sorts of queer work.”      

       “To hear you talk,” put in Sam, with a grin, “one would think you didn't shove off millions of dollars of suspicious stuff on the public through those damn clever letters of yours.”      

       “There's where you didn't stop to think, Sam,” said I. “When I say a stock's going to rise, it rises. When I stop talking about it, it may go on rising or it may fall. But I never advise anybody to buy except when I have every reason to believe it's a good thing. If they hold on too long, that's their own lookout.”      

       “But they invest—”      

       “You use words too carelessly,” I said. “When I say buy, I don't mean invest. When I mean invest, I say invest.” There I laughed. “It's a word I don't often use.”      

       “And that's what you call honesty!” jeered he.     

       “That's what I call honesty,” I retorted, “and that is honesty.”        And I thought so then.     

       “Well—every man has a right to his own notion of what's honest,” he said. “But no man's got a right to complain if a fellow with a different notion criticizes him.”      

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