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“May I ask you a few questions?” she began, brushing past her attorney, Nelson Smith. She launched an attack accusing the witness and his late father of deliberately hiding the fact that Edward had used Hetty’s money to staunch the flow of his own losses. “When your father was writing to me did he ever say to you that he was writing me? Here are these letters where he says none of my money will be used in anything. Yet Mr. Green was using it all the time.” She even suggested that the Ciscos had “sent a man” to Bellows Falls to intimidate her. “Then did you think when you had a sham failure and a sham assignment and sham lawsuits—”

“Mrs. Green!” The objection came not from May’s attorney nor the judge, but from Hetty’s own counsel, trying to prevent her from self-destructing.

May’s lawyer, delighted by Hetty’s outburst, objected to her lawyer’s interruption and urged her to continue. She did so, now accusing both Cisco and Foote of participating directly in the attempts to intimidate her, or worse.

“Did you think I had a tendency to heart disease, and you would put me out of the way and get all the money?” At the audible gasps from various corners of the room, Hetty explained, “I am only asking him if this was a nice little game, because the people in the country said my life wasn’t worth it. I only want to give him an idea of that.”

Finally, a bewildered Cisco was able to respond: “All I can say is that I have no knowledge of any of the circumstances Mrs. Green speaks of.”

Hetty offered this blanket explanation of her own conduct, repeated several times during the proceedings: “I come of good old Quaker blood. All I care for is to do right. Then I am sure to go to heaven.”

Judge Keiley, unmoved by the protestations of righteousness, sided with May, finding his conduct in handling the Cisco failure exemplary. Hetty was required to pay the court costs—estimated at $10,000–$15,000. For all her frugality, she always seemed to consider such expenses money well spent, if she was able to turn the screws a bit on her enemies.

If the financial community had settled on Hetty as scapegoat for the Cisco failure, Hetty herself blamed Collis P. Huntington. His actions had caused the collapse of the firm, putting her deposits, and perhaps even her $25 million, in jeopardy. Hetty’s seething, burning, spitfire hatred of Huntington was inevitable. She set about slowly to take her revenge on the well-known bully, who frightened her not in the least. In time, Huntington’s dislike for Hetty would grow to match hers for him.

But the Cisco failure caused another turning point in Hetty’s life, a more personal one; it marked the effective end of her marriage to Green. Actually, that is not quite so. Hetty and Edward never officially were divorced. In fact, over the years they effected a sort of reconciliation; things would be cordial between them, and for stretches, at least, they would stay under one roof. But it was the effective end of anything resembling a conventional marriage. Hetty had had enough of convention; she had had enough of the masquerade of herself as the dutiful wife and Edward as the financial brains behind the family. He had violated a trust through his mismanagement of money. He had not simply squandered his own fortune; he had sliced into hers. Even at his most confident and robust, Edward was hardly a match for Hetty’s steel-minded determination. When she packed up her two children and walked out, Edward was left, for all intents and purposes, a broken man, without money of his own, reduced to a sort of genteel subsistence. Following the Cisco failure, Hetty was a free agent, in her personal and financial life.

EIGHT

THE VIEW FROM BROOKLYN

For an ambitious capitalist in the United States, the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century was the most golden of golden ages. The Civil War had settled once and for all the nettlesome question that had haunted the country for generations: would the Union survive? It would. In Europe, the end of every war dumped another horde