Explore "The Golden Flood" by Edwin Lefevre on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
On Thursday -- the president, a keen psychologist, to reassure the richest man in the world, had jocularly called it Consternation Day -- Mr. William Mellen and Mr. Richard Dawson entered the bank. They had ridden from Mr. Mellen's house in Mr. Mellen's brougham. They had discussed Mr. Grinnell at great and painful length many times in that week. In the carriage, on the way downtown, they had talked of nothing else. The president was certain that the mystery no longer was a mystery. The burden of his argument had become that a condition, not a theory, confronted them. The time for idle speculation had passed. It behooved them to act. The lingering indecision of Mr. Mellen did not come from inability to change his lifetime's plans in the twinkling of an eye, but from unwillingness to accept at second-hand the inevitableness of something unspeakably disagreeable. All great business generals are opportunists. But at times the greatest minds work femininely.
"The question of whether he makes his gold or not, or how he gets it, now has merely an academic interest, William. The thing is, that he has the gold. " Dawson said it in a playfully exaggerated pedagogical air, yet ready to become deadly earnest in a twinkling.