r ten years
he had paid far more than there had been any necessity to keep
constantly amused, constantly interested. Thanks to a shrewd ancestor
who had bought large tracts of land in a part of Manhattan which had
then been untouched by bricks and mortar, and to others, equally
shrewd, who had held on and watched a city spreading up the Island like
a mustard plant, he could afford whatever price he was asked to pay.
Whole blocks were his where once the sheep had grazed.

Ingenuity to spend his income was required of Palgrave. He possessed
that gift to an expert degree. But he was no easy mark, no mere
degenerate who hacked off great chunks of a splendid fortune for the
sake of violent exercise. He was too indolent for violence, too
inherently fastidious for degeneracy. And deep down somewhere in a
nature that had had no incentive to develop, there was the fag end of
that family shrewdness which had made the early Palgraves envied and
maligned. Tall and well built, with a handsome Anglo-Saxon type of
face, small, soft, fair mustache, large, rather bovine gray eyes, and a
deep cleft in his chin, he gave at first sight an impression of
strength--which left him, however, when he spoke to pretty women. It
was not so much the things he said,--light, jesting, personal
things,--as the indications they gave of the overweening vanity of the
spoiled boy and of a brain which occupied itself merely with the fluff
and thistledown of life. He was, and he knew it and made no effort to
disguise the fact, a typical specimen of the very small class of
indolent bystanders made rich by the energy of other men who are to be
found in every country. He was, in fact, the peculiar type of
aristocrat only to be found in a democracy--the aristocrat not of blood
and breeding or intellect, but of wealth. He was utterly without any
ambition to shine either in social life or politics, or to achieve
advertisement by the affectation of a half-genuine interest in any
cause. On the contrary, he reveled in being idle and indifferent, and
unlike the aristocrats of Europe he refused to catch that archaic
habit, encouraged at Eton and Oxford, of relating everything in the
universe to the standards and prejudices of a single class.

Palgrave was triumphantly one-eyed and selfish; but he waited, with a
sort of satirical wistfulness, for the time when some one person should
cause him to stand eager and startled in a chaos of individualism and
indolence and sha