rded to their station. Editors and bishops
and statesmen and all the rest of their retainers had to believe in the
respectabilities, even in the privacy of their clubs--the people's ears
were getting terribly sharp these days! But among the real giants of
business you might have thought yourself in a society of
revolutionists; they would tear up the mountain tops and hurl them at
each other. When one of these old war-horses once got started, he would
tell tales of deviltry to appall the soul of the hardiest muck-rake
man. It was always the other fellow, of course; but then, if you pinned
your man down, and if he thought that he could trust you--he would
acknowledge that he had sometimes fought the enemy with the enemy's own
weapons!

But of course one must understand that all this radicalism was for
conversational purposes only. The Major, for instance, never had the
slightest idea of doing anything about all the evils of which he told;
when it came to action, he proposed to do just what he had done all his
life--to sit tight on his own little pile. And the Millionaires' was an
excellent place to learn to do it!

"See that old money-bags over there in the corner," said the Major.
"He's a man you want to fix in your mind--old Henry S. Grimes. Have you
heard of him?"

"Vaguely," said the other.

"He's Laura Hegan's uncle. She'll have his money also some day--but
Lord, how he does hold on to it meantime! It's quite tragic, if you
come to know him--he's frightened at his own shadow. He goes in for
slum tenements, and I guess he evicts more people in a month than you
could crowd into this building!"

Montague looked at the solitary figure at the table, a man with a
wizened-up little face like a weasel's, and a big napkin tied around
his neck. "That's so as to save his shirt-front for to-morrow," the
Major explained. "He's really only about sixty, but you'd think he was
eighty. Three times every day he sits here and eats a bowl of graham
crackers and milk, and then goes out and sits rigid in an arm-chair for
an hour. That's the regimen his doctors have put him on--angels and
ministers of grace defend us!"

The old gentleman paused, and a chuckle shook his scarlet jowls. "Only
think!" he said--"they tried to do that to me! But no, sir--when Bob
Venable has to eat graham crackers and milk, he'll put in arsenic
instead of sugar! That's the way with many a one of these rich fellows,
though--you picture him living in Capua