"
"To hear you talk," put in Sam, with a grin, "one would think you didn't
shove off millions of dollars of suspicious stuff on the public through
those damn clever letters of yours."
"There's where you didn't stop to think, Sam," said I. "When I say a
stock's going to rise, it rises. When I stop talking about it, it may go on
rising or it may fall. But I never advise anybody to buy except when I have
every reason to believe it's a good thing. If they hold on too long, that's
their own lookout."
"But they invest--"
"You use words too carelessly," I said. "When I say buy, I don't mean
_invest_. When I mean invest, I say invest." There I laughed. "It's a
word I don't often use."
"And that's what you call honesty!" jeered he.
"That's what I call honesty," I retorted, "and that _is_ honesty." And
I thought so then.
"Well--every man has a right to his own notion of what's honest," he said.
"But no man's got a right to complain if a fellow with a different notion
criticizes him."
"None in the world," I assented. "Do _you_ criticize me?"
"No, no, no, indeed!" he answered, nervous, and taking seriously what I had
intended as a joke.
After a while I dragged in _the_ subject.
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