he,
Crookes, and the housekeeper, who was a highly respectable person and
the sister of a minister, as he wished his mother to remember, had
made up their minds that Mr. V.T. was Al, copper-bottomed--Mrs.
Crookes was the widow of a seafaring man, and lived at Liverpool,
and had heard Lloyd's rating quoted all her life--and that they, the
writer and Mrs. Dubbs, meant to see him through his troubles, though
he was a little trying at his meals, for he would have butter on
the table at his dinner, and he wanted two and three courses served
together, and drank milk at his luncheon, like no Christian gentleman
did that Mr. Crookes had ever seen.

The financier might have been amused if he could have read this
letter, which contained no allusion to the material attractions
of Torp Towers as a situation; for like a good many American
millionaires, Mr. Van Torp had a blind spot on his financial retina.
He could deal daringly and surely with vast sums, or he could screw
twice the normal quantity of work out of an underpaid clerk; but the
household arithmetic that lies between the two was entirely beyond his
comprehension. He 'didn't want to be bothered,' he said; he maintained
that he 'could make more money in ten minutes than he could save in a
year by checking the housekeeper's accounts'; he 'could live on coffee
and pie,' but if he chose to hire the chef of the Cafe Anglais to cook
for him at five thousand dollars a year he 'didn't want to know the
price of a truffled pheasant or a chaudfroid of ortolans.' That was
his way, and it was good enough for him. What was the use of having
made money if you were to be bothered? And besides, he concluded, 'it
was none of anybody's blank blank business what he did.'

Mr. Van Torp did not hesitate to borrow similes from another world
when his rather limited command of refined language was unequal to the
occasion.

But at the present juncture, though his face did not change, and
though he slept as soundly and had as good an appetite as usual, no
words with which he was acquainted could express his feelings at all.
He had, indeed, consigned the writer of the first article to perdition
with some satisfaction; but after his interview with Logotheti,
when he had understood that a general attack upon him had begun, he
gathered his strength in silence and studied the position with all the
concentration of earnest thought which his exceptional nature could
command.

He had recognised Feis