six, and especially every bachelor of
forty-six, he regarded forty-six as a mere meaningless number, as a
futile and even misleading symbol of chronology. He felt that Time had
made a mistake--that he was not really in the fifth decade, and that his
true, practical working age was about thirty.

Moreover, he was in love, for the first time in his life. Like all men
and all women, he had throughout the whole of his adult existence been
ever secretly preoccupied with thoughts, hopes, aspirations, desires,
concerning the other sex, but the fundamental inexperience of his heart
was such that he imagined he was going to be happy because he had fallen
in love.

'I'm glad I sent for that hat,' he said, smiling absently at the Great
Wheel over a mile and a half of roofs.

The key to his character and his career lay in the fact that he
invariably found sufficient courage to respond to his instincts, and
that his instincts were romantic. They had led him in various ways,
sometimes to grandiose and legitimate triumphs, sometimes to hidden
shames which it is merciful to ignore. In the main, they had served him
well. It was in obedience to an instinct that he had capped the nine
stories of the Hugo building with a dome and had made his bed under the
dome. It was in obedience to another instinct that he had sent for the
hat.

'Very pretty, isn't it?' he observed to Shawn, when Simon handed him the
insubstantial and gay object and restored the gold token. They were at a
window in the circular room; the couch had magically melted away.

'I admire it, sir,' said Shawn, and withdrew.

'Dolt!' he cried out upon Shawn in his heart. '_You_ didn't see her at
work on it. As if _you_ could appreciate her exquisite taste and the
amazing skill of her blanched fingers! I alone can appreciate these
things!'

He hung the hat on a Louis Quatorze screen, and blissfully gazed at it,
her creation.

'But I must be careful,' he muttered--'I must be careful.'

A clerk entered with his personal letters. It was scarcely seven
o'clock, but these fifteen or twenty envelopes had already been sorted
from the three thousand missives that constituted his first post; he had
his own arrangement with the Post-Office.

'So it's coming at last,' he said to himself, as he opened an envelope
marked 'Private and Confidential' in red ink. The autograph note within
was from Senior Polycarp, principal partner in Polycarps, the famous
firm of company-promoting s