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I ASSIST A GET-AWAY
199

yet had sent the good bankers into frightful attacks of financial hydrophobia.

Mightn't Janvier show plenty of authority to suggest that he wasn't in a bad business at all?

And suppose he compared it with other businesses; mine, for choice. What was the harm in shoving out a little informal currency compared with the damage in passing out drugged and adulterated food, which many a first family has done?

Then compare it with the coal brokerage business, from which many of my firmest friends are fat. What did they do for their profits, during a late, lamented shortage, but hold a few carloads of coal back from the market and away from people freezing for it so they could whoop the price a little more? Wouldn't everybody be a bit ahead if these people, who haven't the slightest fear of any "long house," had stayed out of the coal business and simply printed their own money for their profits and shoved it into circulation without harming anybody?

You see, as I thought it over, it didn't seem strange to me that Doris Wellington could smile and smile at me and not feel herself a villainess at all.