At first it seemed quite a wonderful thing to young Cowperwood--the very physical face of it--for he liked human presence and activity; but a little later the sense of the thing as a picture or a dramatic situation, of which he was a part faded, and he came down to a clearer sense of the intricacies of the problem before him.

Buying and selling stocks, as he soon learned, was an art, a subtlety, almost a psychic emotion.

Suspicion, intuition, feeling--these were the things to be "long" on.
Yet in time he also asked himself, who was it who made the real money--the stock-brokers?
Not at all.

Some of them were making money, but they were, as he quickly saw, like a lot of gulls or stormy petrels, hanging on the lee of the wind, hungry and anxious to snap up any unwary fish.

Back of them were other men, men with shrewd ideas, subtle resources.