home from a foreign land in response to a message
announcing the sudden death of his father. The devolving of his
parent's vast fortune upon himself--he was the sole heir--then
necessitated his permanent location in New York. And so, reluctantly
giving up his travels, he gathered his agents and lieutenants about
him, concentrating his interests as much as possible in the Ames
building, and settled down to the enjoyment of expanding his huge
fortune. A few months later he married, and the union amalgamated the
proud old Essex stock of Ames, whose forbears fought under the
Conqueror and were written in the Doomsday Book, to the wealthy and
aristocratic Van Heyse branch of old Amsterdam. To this union were
born a son and a daughter, twins.

The interval between his graduation from college and the death of his
father was all but unknown to the cronies of his subsequent years in
New York. Though he had spent much of it in the metropolis, he had
been self-centered and absorbed, even lonely, while laying his plans
and developing the schemes which resulted in financial preeminence.
With unlimited money at his disposal, he was unhampered in the choice
of his business clientele, and he formed it from every quarter of the
globe. Much of his time had been spent abroad, and he had become as
well known on the Paris bourse and the exchanges of Europe as in his
native land. Confident and successful from the outset; without any
trace of pride or touch of hauteur in his nature; as wholly lacking in
ethical development and in generosity as he was in fear; gradually
becoming more sociable and companionable, although still reticent of
certain periods of his past; his cunning and brutality increasing with
years; and his business sagacity and keen strategy becoming the talk
of the Street; with no need to raise his eyes beyond the low plane of
his material endeavors; he pursued his business partly for the
pleasure the game afforded him, partly for the power which his
accumulations bestowed upon him, and mostly because it served as an
adequate outlet for his tremendous, almost superhuman, driving energy.
If he betrayed and debauched ideals, it was because he was utterly
incapable of rising to them, nor felt the stimulus to make the
attempt. If he achieved no noble purpose, it was because when he
glanced at the mass of humanity about him he looked through the lenses
of self. His glance fell always first upon J. Wilton Ames--and he
never looked