“ ‘Ah, American,’ he said. ‘We know of your compatriot, then, here in Italy⁠—this Jadwin of Chicago, who has bought all the wheat. We have no more bread. The loaf is small as the fist, and costly. We cannot buy it, we have no money. For myself, I do not care. I am young. I can eat lentils and cress. But’ and here his voice was a whisper⁠—‘but my mother⁠—my mother!’ ”

“It’s a lie!” Jadwin cried. “Of course it’s a lie. Good God, if I were to believe every damned story the papers print about me these days I’d go insane.”

Yet when he put up the price of wheat to a dollar and twenty cents, the great flour mills of Minnesota and Wisconsin stopped grinding, and finding a greater profit in selling the grain than in milling it, threw their stores upon the market. Though the bakers did not increase the price of their bread as a consequence of this, the loaf⁠—even in Chicago, even in the centre of that great Middle West that weltered in the luxury of production⁠—was smaller, and from all the poorer districts of the city came complaints, protests, and vague grumblings of discontent.