named
Barclay, whom he saw sometimes at his club; and they sat talking
together until long after midnight. Barclay was a keen, aggressively
energetic person, who lived in a continual rush of affairs, which had
not kept him from a decided over-development about the waist. He was
married to an invalid wife, who, as he now told Kemper, was threatened
with consumption and condemned to spend the whole year in the
Adirondacks. Kemper had seen her once, and though she was neither pretty
nor intelligent, he remembered her with respect as the owner of a
property of forty millions. The knowledge of this fact covered her with
a certain distinction in his mind, and because of it he condoned almost
unconsciously the absence in her of any more personal attraction than
that of wealth. The marriage, so far as he could judge, had been, from
Barclay's point of view, entirely satisfactory--domestic affairs
occupied no place whatever in the man's existence, which was devoted
exclusively to speculation in stocks; and he had solved the eternal
problem of philosophy by reducing life, not to a formula, but to a
figure. Of scandal there had never blown the faintest breath about him;
he paid apparently as little attention to other women as to his wife;
and money, Kemper decided now, not without an irrational envy, appeared
to satisfy as well as absorb his every instant.

"Yes, it's a great thing to get back to the woods now and then," Barclay
was saying, "I usually manage to run up for Sunday--and then I find time
to look over all the news of the week."

By "news," Kemper was aware he meant only the changes in the stock
market; but his recognition that the man had not so much as a casual
interest above the accumulation of wealth, did not detract in the least
from the admiration with which Barclay inspired him. This was a life
that counted! he thought with generous enthusiasm; and success
incarnate, he felt, was riding beside him in the train.

Barclay had drawn a paper from his pocket, and was following the list of
figures with the point of his toothpick. Though there was but one
subject upon which he possessed even the rudiments of knowledge, the
fact that he could speak with authority in a single department of life
had conferred upon him a certain dignity of manner; and so Kemper, as he
fell into conversation with him, found himself wishing that he might
arrange to be thrown with him during the month of his vacation. Money,
though he himse