he rooms would ruin my
clothes; the sound of the rats rompin' up and down the tapestry would
destroy my high spirits; and then where'd I be?"

I looked at him. He, too, then, was of the nouveaux-pauvres, the class
that is sinking down, down under the scrambling, upward-climbing feet of
the successful. But he took the situation in a different spirit from the
way in which my Aunt Anastasia took it. He frankly made what he could
out of it. He hoisted the Jolly Roger and became a pirate on the very
seas that had engulfed the old order.

Disgraceful of him.... One ought not to wish to listen to what he had to
say.

"Champagne tastes on a beer income; that's bad. But here's this
little--this little Million girl with a champagne income and no tastes
at all yet. I shall be worth half her income to her in consequence," he
announced. "I shall be able to give her priceless tips. Advice, you
know, about--oh, where to buy all the things she'll want. The cars. The
wines and cigars. (Even a grown-up woman isn't often to be trusted about
those.) The country house she'll have to take. What about Lovelace
Court, Miss Lovelace? Care to have her there, in case the people who
have got it want to turn out? I've no doubt I could wangle that for you,
if you liked."

I said, feeling bewildered, and flurried, and amused all at once: "What
is 'wangle'?"

The Honourable Jim Burke laughed aloud as he devoured his lemon water
ice.

"You'll know the meaning of that mystic verb before you have known me
very long," he said. "It's the way I make my living."

I looked at him, sitting there so debonair and showy in his expensive
raiment, talking so cynically in that golden voice. So typically one of
"our" world, as Aunt Anastasia prophetically calls it; yet so ready to
rub shoulders with every other kind of world that there may be--Jews,
theatrical people, hotel porters, pork-butchers, heiresses!

I asked, rather inquisitively: "Make your living how? What do you do?"

"People, mostly," said the Honourable Jim with a cheery grin.

No; there's no getting any truth or any sense out of a man like that.

Just before we rose from the tea-table I said to him: "And the end of it
all? I suppose you'll marry--I suppose you'll get Miss Million to marry
you!"

"Marry?" said Mr. Burke with a little quick movement of his broad chest
and shoulders. An odd movement! It seemed mixed up of a start, a
shudder, and a shaking aside of something. "Marry? A woman