, even
mean house in East Fifty-second Street--one of a row and an almost
dingy looking row at that. There he had an establishment a man with
one-fiftieth of his fortune would have felt like apologizing for. The
dishes on his table, for example, were cheap and almost coarse, and
the pictures on his walls were photographs or atrocious
bargain-counter paintings. To his few intimates who were intimate
enough to question him about his come-down from his Chicago splendors,
he explained that with advancing years he was seeing with clearer eyes
his responsibilities as a steward of the Lord, that luxury was sinful,
and no man had the right to waste the Lord's gifts that way. The
general theory about him was that advancing years had developed his
natural closeness into the stingiest avariciousness. But my notion is
he was impelled by the fear of exciting envy, by the fear of
assassination--the fear that made his eyes roam restlessly whenever
strangers were near him, and so dried up the inside of his body that
his dry tongue was constantly sliding along his dry lips. I have seen
a convict stand in the door of his cell and, though it was impossible
that anyone could be behind him, look nervously over his shoulder
every moment or so. Roebuck had the same trick--only his dread, I
suspect, was not the officers of the law, even of the divine law, but
the many, many victims of his merciless execution of "the Lord's
will." This state of mind is more common than is generally supposed,
among the very rich men, especially those who have come up from
poverty. Those who have inherited great wealth, and have always been
used to it, get into the habit of looking upon the mass of mankind as
inferiors, and move about with no greater sense of peril than a man
has in venturing among a lot of dogs with tails wagging. But those who
were born poor and have risen under the stimulus of a furious envy of
the comfortable and the rich, fancy that everybody who isn't rich has
the same savage hunger which they themselves had, and is ready to use
the same desperate methods in gratifying it. Thus, where the rich of
the Langdon sort are supercilious, the rich of the Roebuck sort are
nervous and often become morbid on the subject of assassination as
they grow richer and richer.

The door of Roebuck's house was opened for me by a maid--a manservant
would have been a "sinful" luxury, a manservant might be an assassin
or might be hired by plotters against his lif