n
importunate tradesman. And he had never tried to earn a dollar in his
life; as to current methods of making a living, he was as ignorant as a
Pueblo Indian.

What did others do? The men he knew who joked of their poverty and their
debts, and whose hilarious habit it was to picture life as a desperate
handicap in which they were forever "three jumps ahead of the sheriff",
somehow managed to cling to their yachts and their stables. Few of his
friends had really gone "smash", and of these all but one had taken
themselves speedily and decently off. He thought of Rod Creighton, the
one failure who had clung to the old life, achieving for a transient
period the brilliant success of living on his friends. When this ended
he had gone on the road for some champagne or other. Everybody had
ordered from him at the start. But this, too, had failed. He had dropped
out of the clubs and there had at last befallen an evil time when he had
come to haunt the avenue, as keen for stray quarters as any pan-handler.
Where was Creighton now, he wondered?

Across the avenue was Larry Treadwell's brokerage office. Larry had a
brain for business; as a youthful scamp in knickerbockers he had been as
sharp as a steel-trap. But what did he, John Valiant, know of business?
Less than of law! Why, he was not fit to smirk behind a counter and
measure lace insertion for the petticoats of the women he waltzed with!
All he was really fit for was to work with his hands!

He thought of a gang of laborers he had seen that afternoon breaking the
asphalt with crowbars. What must it be to toil through the clammy cold
of winter and the smothering fur-heat of summer, in some revolting
routine of filth and unredeemable ugliness? He looked down at his supple
white fingers and shivered.

He rose grimly and dragged his chair facing the window. The night was
balmy and he looked down across the darker sea of reefs, barred like a
gigantic checker-board by the shining lines of streets, to where the
flashing electric signs of the theater district laid their wide swath
of colored radiance. The manifold calls of the street and the buzz of
trolleys made a dull tonal background, subdued and far-away.

To be outside! All that light and color and comfort and pleasure would
hum and sparkle on just the same, though he was no longer within the
circle of its effulgence--slaving perhaps, he thought with a twisted
smile, at some tawdry occupation that called for no experience,