n call "impossible ideals about women," and it behooves his
masculine friends to watch out for him carefully lest he come a cropper.
Mr. Dennis Farraday was such a man among men, and Mr. Godfrey Vandeford
loved him deeply. They had met when they were both twenty-three, on
board a tramp steamer, bound for adventure in South Africa, and in the
seven years that had elapsed since then they had spent periods of time
together, in various kinds of sports. Killing time on Broadway was about
the only sport that they had not tried together. By very solid banking
and brokering Mr. Vandeford enjoyed and increased for himself and an
aristocratic, Knickerbocker-descended mother a few ancestral millions.
Incidentally, he took care of the sole hundred thousand dollars of which
Mr. Vandeford's high financiering on Broadway had left him possessed.
Mr. Farraday and Mrs. Justus Farraday represented the sole family ties
possessed by Mr. Vandeford, and he considered them both most valuable.
In fact, the maternal regard of Mrs. Justus Farraday was looked upon by
Mr. Vandeford as his chief treasure and sheet-anchor in times of the
high winds of life.

"What makes you do it, Van?" questioned Mr. Farraday, as he sat with Mr.
Vandeford in the early morning in the latter's rooms after the tumult of
the first night of the unsuccessful "Miss Cut-up."

"Excitement," answered Mr. Vandeford, as he put his bare heels,
protruding from his Chinese slippers, up on the edge of the mahogany
reading-table in his living-room, and began to pull at a long,
evil-smelling, briar pipe. "Nothing like it."

"Do you really care for all that noise, those explosions of chorus
girls, sweating stage hands, cursing director and cursing star, paint,
powder, electricity, paper walls and furniture, call-bells and
hand-clapping from boozy critics in front?"

"I do," answered Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, with a glint in his eyes deep
back in his head. "And so would you if you had bet about twenty thousand
on that combination and could see the people begin to eat it up right
before your eyes as you sat in a box and watched 'em. When you've backed
your own combination of inferno on riot, it gives you a thrill to stand
before the box-office and watch a line of people that stretches to the
next block plunk down dollars that they have earned at their own
particular combinations of life to see the combination you have made of
yours. Why, tears come into my eyes when I see some little, o