broke, in
the office, but when you separate them from their money there's nothing
left, not even their friends.

I never see a fellow trying to crawl or to buy his way into society that
I don't think of my old friend Hank Smith and his wife Kate--Kate Botts
she was before he married her--and how they tried to butt their way
through the upper crust.

Hank and I were boys together in Missouri, and he stayed along in the
old town after I left. I heard of him on and off as tending store a
little, and farming a little, and loafing a good deal. Then I forgot all
about him, until one day a few years ago when he turned up in the papers
as Captain Henry Smith, the Klondike Gold King, just back from Circle
City, with a million in dust and anything you please in claims. There's
never any limit to what a miner may be worth in those, except his
imagination.

I was a little puzzled when, a week later, my office boy brought me a
card reading Colonel Henry Augustus Bottes-Smythe, but I supposed it was
some distinguished foreigner who had come to size me up so that he could
round out his roast on Chicago in his new book, and I told the boy to
show the General in.

I've got a pretty good memory for faces, and I'd bought too much store
plug of Hank in my time not to know him, even with a clean shave and a
plug hat. Some men dry up with success, but it was just spouting out of
Hank. Told me he'd made his pile and that he was tired of living on the
slag heap; that he'd spent his whole life where money hardly whispered,
let alone talked, and he was going now where it would shout. Wanted to
know what was the use of being a nob if a fellow wasn't the nobbiest
sort of a nob. Said he'd bought a house on Beacon Hill, in Boston, and
that if I'd prick up my ears occasionally I'd hear something drop into
the Back Bay. Handed me his new card four times and explained that it
was the rawest sort of dog to carry a brace of names in your card
holster; that it gave you the drop on the swells every time, and that
they just had to throw up both hands and pass you the pot when you
showed down. Said that Bottes was old English for Botts, and that Smythe
was new American for Smith; the Augustus was just a fancy touch, a sort
of high-card kicker.

I didn't explain to Hank, because it was congratulations and not
explanations that he wanted, and I make it a point to show a customer
the line of goods that he's looking for. And I never heard the full
particu