rn to the spirit of
the day when I had known him as a bustling, pompous man. "It is
remarkable that he can be happy doing nothing. Look how restless I am
with nothing to do but to play golf and read magazines. I can't
understand him. And yet he seems a decent young man."

"But, you must remember, he is going out all the time," said Mrs.
Bannister. "A man simply couldn't go out as he does and do anything.
He is always in demand. Why, I know a dozen families into which he
would be heartily welcomed. Last year it was reported that he was
engaged to marry Jane Carmody, the mine man's daughter; but she was
rather plain--to be truthful, very plain--and I will say for Herbert
Talcott that he is not the kind who would marry solely for money."

Mrs. Bannister went on chattering her praise of Herbert Talcott, with a
subtle purpose, I suspected, of impressing on me the utter absurdity of
my entering the lists with him and of bringing Rufus Blight to a keener
appreciation of the man whom he might be called on any day to welcome
into his own family. With me her efforts were quite unneeded. With
Rufus Blight the impression which she seemed to create was alone one of
astonishment that any man could be happy doing nothing. Again and
again he interrupted her to express his doubt on that point, and when
dinner was over and Mrs. Bannister had retired, and we were smoking in
the room which he called his den, he unmasked to me a mind weary of
working over nothing. He should never have sold out to the trust, he
said; in the mills he had been happy; every hour had its task and every
day its victories in orders for rails and armor-plate. Now in a single
day every month he could cut coupons and attend to dividends, and the
others he must pass with golf and magazines.

His den? How quickly does this bourgeois phrase call up before us a
hodgepodge room, an atmosphere of stale tobacco smoke, a table covered
with pipes, books and magazines, littered with tobacco, walls burdened
with hideous prints, a mantel adorned with objects dear to their owner
from their associations, to the visitor hideous. The alien mind which
had conceived the great library had evidently been held at bay when
Rufus Blight was fitting himself into this den, his real home.

Over the fireplace was a great steel plate of the regretted mills, a
world covered with immaculate smokeless buildings and cut with streets
in which women were taking the air in barouches a