Gad, sir,
you can't live like a gentleman on less than a thousand dollars a day.
That was years and years ago. Afterward he doubled his estimate.
Subsequently, he quadrupled it. It made no hole in him either. In spite
of his yacht, his racing stable, his town house, his country residences
and formerly in the great days, or rather in the great nights, his
ladies of the ballet, in spite of these incidentals his wealth
increased. No end to it, is about the way in which he was currently
quoted.

All New Yorkers knew him, at any rate by repute, precisely as the least
among us knows Mr. Carnegie, though perhaps more intimately. The tales
of his orgies, of his ladies, of that divorce case and of the yacht
scandal which burst like a starball, tales Victorian and now legendary,
have, in their mere recital, made many an old reprobate's mouth
champagne. But latterly, during the present generation that is, the
ineffable Paliser--M. P. for short--who, with claret liveries and a yard
of brass behind him had tooled his four-in-hand, or else, in his superb
white yacht, gave you something to talk about, well, from living very
extensively he had renounced the romps and banalities of this life.

Old reprobates could chuckle all they liked over the uproar he had
raised in the small and early family party that social New York used to
be. But in club windows there were no new tales of him to tell. Like a
potentate outwearied with the circumstance of State, he had chucked it,
definitely for himself, and recently in favour of his son, Monty, who,
in the month of March, 1917, arrived from Havana at the family
residence, which in successive migrations had moved, as the heart of
Manhattan has moved, from the neighbourhood of the Battery to that of
the Plaza.

In these migrations the Palisers had not derogated from their high
estate. Originally, one of the first families here, the centuries, few
but plural, had increased what is happily known as their prestige. Monty
Paliser was conscious of that, but not unwholesomely. The enamellings
that his father had added gave him no concern whatever. On the contrary.
He knew that trade would sack the Plaza, as long since it had razed the
former citadels of fashion, and he foresaw the day when the family
residence, ousted from upper Fifth Avenue, would be perched on a peak of
Washington Heights, where the Palisers would still be among the first
people in New York--to those coming in town that way.

Tha