to another. "Gee! a man wouldn't want anything better than that,
would he?"

It was the spontaneous tribute that passion and envy invariably
pay to health and beauty. On that pivot swings the world.

Never in all his life until this trip had Cowperwood been farther
west than Pittsburg. His amazing commercial adventures, brilliant
as they were, had been almost exclusively confined to the dull,
staid world of Philadelphia, with its sweet refinement in sections,
its pretensions to American social supremacy, its cool arrogation
of traditional leadership in commercial life, its history,
conservative wealth, unctuous respectability, and all the tastes
and avocations which these imply. He had, as he recalled, almost
mastered that pretty world and made its sacred precincts his own
when the crash came. Practically he had been admitted. Now he
was an Ishmael, an ex-convict, albeit a millionaire. But wait!
The race is to the swift, he said to himself over and over. Yes,
and the battle is to the strong. He would test whether the world
would trample him under foot or no.

Chicago, when it finally dawned on him, came with a rush on the
second morning. He had spent two nights in the gaudy Pullman then
provided--a car intended to make up for some of the inconveniences
of its arrangements by an over-elaboration of plush and tortured
glass--when the first lone outposts of the prairie metropolis began
to appear. The side-tracks along the road-bed over which he was
speeding became more and more numerous, the telegraph-poles more
and more hung with arms and strung smoky-thick with wires. In the
far distance, cityward, was, here and there, a lone working-man's