in, "yes, Jimmy is a good chap. I've known
him for years. I was at college with him. He hasn't got my
brilliance of intellect; but he has some wonderfully fine qualities.
For one thing, I should say he had put more deadbeats on their legs
again than half the men in New York put together."

"Well," growled Willett, whom the misfortunes of the Belle had
soured, "what's there in that? It's mighty easy to do the
philanthropist act when you're next door to a millionaire."

"Yes," said Mifflin warmly, "but it's not so easy when you're
getting thirty dollars a week on a newspaper. When Jimmy was a
reporter on the News, there used to be a whole crowd of fellows just
living on him. Not borrowing an occasional dollar, mind you, but
living on him--sleeping on his sofa, and staying to breakfast. It
made me mad. I used to ask him why he stood for it. He said there
was nowhere else for them to go, and he thought he could see them
through all right--which he did, though I don't see how he managed
it on thirty a week."

"If a man's fool enough to be an easy mark--" began Willett.

"Oh, cut it out!" said Raikes. "We don't want anybody knocking Jimmy
here."

"All the same," said Sutton, "it seems to me that it was mighty
lucky that he came into that money. You can't keep open house for
ever on thirty a week. By the way, Arthur, how was that? I heard it
was his uncle."

"It wasn't his uncle," said Mifflin. "It was by way of being a
romance of sorts, I believe. Fellow who had been in love with
Jimmy's mother years ago went West, made a pile, and left it to Mrs.
Pitt or her children. She had been dead some time when that
happened. Jimmy, of course, hadn't a notion of what was coming to
him, when suddenly he got a solicitor's letter asking him to call.
He rolled round, and found that there was about five hundred
thousand dollars just waiting for him to spend it."

Jimmy Pitt had now definitely ousted "Love, the Cracksman" as a
topic of conversation. Everybody present knew him. Most of them had
known him in his newspaper days; and, though every man there would
have perished rather than admit it, they were grateful to Jimmy for
being exactly the same to them now that he could sign a check for
half a million as he had been on the old thirty-a-week basis.
Inherited wealth, of course, does not make a young man nobler or
more admirable; but the young man does not always know this.

"Jimmy's had a queer life," said Mifflin. "He's been pr