1
The Banker and the Bear
The Story of a Corner in Lard
by Henry Kitchell Webster
New York The MacMillan Company London: MacMillan & Co., Ltd.
1900
THE BANKER AND THE BEAR
CHAPTER I
BEGINNINGS
For more than forty years Bagsbury and Company was old John Bagsbury himself; merely another expression of his stiff, cautious personality. Like him it had been old from infancy; you could as easily imagine that he had once been something of a dandy, had worn a stiff collar and a well-brushed hat, as that its dusty black-walnut furniture had ever smelled of varnish. And, conversely, though he had a family, a religion to whose requirements he was punctiliously attentive, and a really fine library, the bank represented about all there was of old John Bagsbury.
Beside a son, John, he had a daughter, born several years earlier, whom they christened Martha. She grew into a capricious, pretty girl, whom her father did not try to understand, particularly as he thought she never could be of the smallest importance to Bagsbury and Company. When, before she was twenty, in utter disregard of her father's forcibly expressed objection, she married Victor Haselridge, she dropped forever out of the old man's life.
The boy, John, was too young to understand when this happened, and as his mother died soon after, he grew almost to forget that he had ever had a sister. He was very different: serious and, on the surface at least, placid. He had the old man's lumpy head and his thin-lidded eyes, though his mouth was, like his mother's, generous. His father had high hopes that h