choose seclusion after the awful tragedy at her home in Virginia. But they
could not understand why, with such cause for mourning, the exquisite
figure beside Bob in the victoria should always be garbed in gray. After a
while it was whispered that there was something wrong in Bob's household.
Then his friends and acquaintances ceased to whisper or to think of his
affairs. With all New York's bad points--and they are as plentiful as her
church spires and charity bazaars--she has one offsetting virtue. If a
dweller in her midst chooses to let New York alone, New York is willing to
reciprocate. In her most crowded fashionable districts a person may come
and go for a lifetime, and none in the block in which he dwells will know
when his coming and going ceases. When a New Yorker reads in his newspaper
of the man who lives next door to him, "murdered and his body discovered
by the gas man" or the tax collector, the butcher or the baker, as the
case may be, he never thinks he may have been remiss in his neighbourly
duties. There is no such word as "neighbour" in the New York City
dictionary. It may have been there once, but, if so, it was long
ago used as a stake for the barbed-wire fence of exclusive
keep-your-distance-we-keep-our-distance-until-we-know-youness. It is told
of a minister from the rural districts, an old-fashioned American, who
came to New York to take charge of a parish, that he started out to make
his calls and was seized in the hall of what in civilisation would have
been his next-door neighbour. He was rushed away to Bellevue for
examination as to sanity. The verdict was: "Insane. Had no letter of
introduction and was not in the set."

Shortly after the first anniversary of his wedding Bob gave up his office
with Randolph & Randolph and opened one for himself. He explained that he
was giving up his commission business to devote all his time to personal
trading. With the opening of his new office he again became the most
active man on the floor. His trading was intermittent. For weeks he would
not be seen at the Exchange or on "the Street." Then he would return and,
after executing a series of brilliant trades, which were invariably
successful, he would again disappear. He soon became known as the luckiest
operator in Wall Street, and the beginning of his every new deal was the
signal for his fast-growing following to tag on.

From time to time I learned that Beulah Sands was making no real
improvement, tho