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would be glad to make most of his profit that way. The city should allow him his normal
percentage on all his actual sales of certificates for the city at par (he would have to have that in
order to keep straight with the stock exchange); but beyond that, and for all the other necessary
manipulative sales, of which there would be many, he would depend on his knowledge of the
stock market to reimburse him. And if Stener wanted to speculate with him--well.
Dark as this transaction may seem to the uninitiated, it will appear quite clear to those who
know. Manipulative tricks have always been worked in connection with stocks of which one man
or one set of men has had complete control. It was no different from what subsequently was
done with Erie, Standard Oil, Copper, Sugar, Wheat, and what not. Cowperwood was one of the
first and one of the youngest to see how it could be done. When he first talked to Stener he was
twenty-eight years of age. When he last did business with him he was thirty-four.
The houses and the bank-front of Cowperwood & Co. had been proceeding apace. The latter
was early Florentine in its decorations with windows which grew narrower as they approached
the roof, and a door of wrought iron set between delicately carved posts, and a straight lintel of
brownstone. It was low in height and distinguished in appearance. In the center panel had been
hammered a hand, delicately wrought, thin and artistic, holding aloft a flaming brand. Ellsworth
informed him that this had formerly been a money-changer's sign used in old Venice, the
significance of which had long been forgotten.
The interior was finished in highly-polished hardwood, stained in imitation of the gray lichens
which infest trees. Large sheets of clear, beveled glass were used, some oval, some oblong,
some square, and some circular, following a given theory of eye movement. The fixtures for the
gas-jets were modeled after the early Roman flame-brackets, and the office safe was made an
ornament, raised on a marble platform at the back of the office and lacquered a silver-gray, with
Cowperwood & Co. lettered on it in gold. One had a sense of reserve and taste pervading the
place, and yet it was also inestimably prosperous, solid and assuring. Cowperwood, when he
viewed it at its completion, complimented Ellsworth cheerily. "I like this. It is really beautiful. It
will be a pleasure to work here. If those houses are going to be anything like this, they will be
perfect."
"Wait till you see them. I think you will be pleased, Mr. Cowperwood. I am taking especial pains
with yours because it is smaller. It is really easier to treat your father's. But yours--" He went off
into a description of the entrance-hall, reception-room and parlor, which he was arranging and
decorating in such a way as to give an effect of size and dignity not really conformable to the
actual space.
And when the houses were finished, they were effective and arresting--quite different from the
conventional residences of the street. They were separated by a space of twenty feet, laid out
as greensward. The architect had borrowed somewhat from the Tudor school, yet not so
elaborated as later became the style in many of the residences in Philadelphia and elsewhere.
The most striking features were rather deep-recessed doorways under wide, low, slightly
floriated arches, and three projecting windows of rich form, one on the second floor of Frank's
house, two on the facade of his father's. There were six gables showing on the front of the two
houses, two on Frank's and four on his father's. In the front of each house on the ground floor
was a recessed window unconnected with the recessed doorways, formed by setting the inner
external wall back from the outer face of the building. This window looked out through an arched
opening to the street, and was protected by a dwarf parapet or balustrade. It was possible to set
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