and men of respectability who do not
possess a dress-coat, are not entirely lacking in New York. If he had
known more of the world he would have known that the world is to be
taken less to heart. People are always more lenient toward a mistake in
etiquette than the perspiring culprit is able to imagine them. In after
years Millard smiled at the remembrance that he had worried over
Farnsworth's company. It was not worth the trouble of a dress-coat.

His first impulse was to forswear society, and to escape mortification
in future, by refusing all invitations. If he had been a weakling such
an outcome would have followed a false start. It is only a man who can
pluck the blossom of success out of the very bramble of disaster.

During that dinner party had come to him a dim conception of a society
complicated and conventional to a degree that the upper circle in
Cappadocia had never dreamed of. He firmly resolved now to know this in
all its ramifications; to get the mastery of it in all its details, so
that no man should understand it better than he. To put it under foot by
superior skill was to be his revenge, the satisfaction he proposed to
make to his wounded vanity. As he could not even faintly conceive what
New York society was like--as he had no notion of its Pelions on Ossas
piled--so he could as yet form no estimate of the magnitude of the
success he was destined to achieve. It is always thus with a man on the
threshold of a great career.

Among the widely varying definitions of genius in vogue, everybody is
permitted to adopt that which flatters his self-love or serves his
immediate purpose. "Great powers accidentally determined in a given
direction" is what some one has called it. Millard was hardly a man of
great powers, but he was a man of no small intelligence. If he had been
sufficiently bedeviled by poverty at the outset who knows that he might
not have hardened into a stock-jobbing prestidigitator, and made the
world the poorer by so much as he was the richer? On the other hand, he
might perhaps have been a poet. Certainly a man of his temperament and
ingenuity might by practice have come to write rondeaus, ballades, and
those other sorts of soap-bubble verse just now in fashion; and if he
had been so lucky as to be disappointed in love at the outset of his
career, it is quite within the limits of possibility that he should have
come to write real poetry, fourteen lines to the piece. But as the first
great