She had started Keystone with a small inheritance and one uncompromising conviction: that capital exists to build things, and that a person who uses it to tear things down and pocket the pieces has misunderstood the entire point of money.

She had run the firm on that conviction for twenty-seven years, through good markets and terrible ones, and she had never once, that I knew of, broken it.

She had been offered, over twenty-seven years, every ordinary temptation a person in finance is offered — the shortcut that no one would catch, the client who wanted the flattering number, the deal that would have made her rich a little faster by costing someone else a great deal.

She had declined all of it, not loudly, not as a performance of virtue, but quietly, as a matter of what capital was for, and the ledgers in my lap were the record of twenty-seven years of those quiet refusals adding up into something that outlived her.