For Enderby was a man of real
power. He might easily have been the most munificently paid corporation
attorney in the country but for the various kinds of business which he
would not, in his own homely phrase, "poke at with a burnt stick."
Notwithstanding his prejudices, he was confidential legal adviser, in
personal and family affairs, to a considerable percentage of the
important men and women of New York. He was supposed to be the only man
who could handle that bull-elephant of finance, ruler of Wall Street,
and, when he chose to give it his contemptuous attention, dictator,
through his son and daughters, of the club and social world of New York,
old Poultney Masters, in the apoplectic rages into which the slightest
thwart to his will plunged him. To Enderby's adroitness the financier
(one of whose pet vanities was a profound and wholly baseless faith in
himself as a connoisseur of art) owed it that he had not become a
laughing-stock through his purchase of a pair of particularly flagrant
Murillos, planted for his special behoof by a gang of clever Italian
swindlers. Rumor had it that when Enderby had privately summed up his
client's case for his client's benefit before his client as referee, in
these words: "And, Mr. Masters, if you act again in these matters
without consulting me, you must find another lawyer; I cannot afford
fools for clients"--they had to call in a physician and resort to the
ancient expedient of bleeding, to save the great man's cerebral arteries
from bursting.
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