Page:The gold brick (1910).djvu/89

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and many a woman, and many a child, cried. The poor had lost a friend, and they would not soon forget him. In the long days of the distant winter they would think of him over and over. Every one in that ward was poor, though the reformers, condescending that way whenever Jimmy was up for reëlection, somehow never grasped the real significance of the fact. And it was a somber Monday around the city hall. Jimmy had been a man with a genius for friendship. The gang mourned him in a sadness that had added to it the remorse of a recent sobriety, but their grief, genuine as it was, had in it an evil bitterness their hearts would not have owned. They were restive and troubled. Whenever they got together in little groups, they read consternation in one another's faces, and now and then they cursed the caution they had extolled on Saturday night. Besides these varied effects, Jimmy's death, while it could not create a crisis in the market, nevertheless gave rise to nervous feelings in certain segments of financial circles. It was inevitable that financial and political circles should overlap and intersect each other in this matter, and there were conferences which seemed to reflect a