When he was thirteen he got a job as door boy in a Wall Street bucket shop, and his widowed mother supposed he had begun a career in banking. What begins in a bucket shop is a career in pure gambling. Pretending to be a broker, the proprietor of a bucket shop is the same as a race-track bookmaker or the keeper of a gambling house. People bet with him on the rise and fall of shares. If they guess wrong he wins their money. If a number of them happen to guess right he absconds. That is why the bucket shop is both immoral and illegal; why also the bucket shop fraternity is beyond the pale in Wall Street. Its members bear a stigma, like people of the underworld; they cannot be received in respectable financial society. They walk in the same thoroughfares; they eat and drink in the same restaurants. The unsophisticated eye is unable to see wherein they differ from respectability itself. Some of them are very likable to know, yet one shall not know them—that is, not without besmirching oneself with the stigma that is theirs.
