His wife's
extravagance was putting a strain on his finances, and he was faced
with the choice of checking her or increasing his income. Being very
much in love, he shrank from the former task and adopted the other way
out of the difficulty.
It was this that had led to the change in his manner noticed by Steve.
In order to make more money he had had to take risks, and only recently
had he begun to perceive how extremely risky these risks were. For the
first time in its history the firm of Bannister was making first-hand
acquaintance with frenzied finance.
It is, perhaps, a little unfair to lay the blame for this entirely at
the door of Bailey's Sybil. Her extravagance was largely responsible;
but Bailey's newly found freedom was also a factor in the developments
of the firm's operations. If you keep a dog, a dog with a high sense of
his abilities and importance, tied up and muzzled for a length of time
and then abruptly set it free the chances are that it will celebrate
its freedom. This had happened in the case of Bailey.
Just as her father's money had caused Ruth to plunge into a whirl of
pleasures which she did not really enjoy, merely for the novelty of it,
so the death of John Bannister and his own consequent accession to the
throne had upset Bailey's balance and embarked him on an orgy of
speculation quite foreign to his true nature.
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