"Got in yesterday. Can you come up to the house and lunch with me
to-day?"

"I'll be glad to," I said, and meant it, for I liked Philip Vantine.

"I'll look for you, then, about one-thirty."

And that is how it happened that, an hour later, I was walking over
toward Washington Square, just above which, on the Avenue, the old
Vantine mansion stood. It was almost the last survival of the old
régime; for the tide of business had long since overflowed from the
neighbouring streets into the Avenue and swept its fashionable folk
far uptown. Tall office and loft buildings had replaced the
brownstone houses; only here and there did some old family hold on,
like a sullen and desperate rear-guard defying the advancing enemy.

Philip Vantine was one of these. He had been born in the house where
he still lived, and declared that he would die there. He had no one
but himself to please in the matter, since he was unmarried and lived
alone, and he mitigated the increasing roar and dust of the
neighbourhood by long absences abroad. It was from one of these that
he had just returned.

I may as well complete this pencil-sketch. Vantine was about fifty
years of age, the possessor of a comfortable fortune, something of a
connoisseur in art matters, a collector of old furniture, a little
eccentric--though now that I have written the word, I find that I
must qualify it, for his only eccentricity was that he persisted, in
spite of many temptations, in remaining a bachelor. Marriageable
women had long since ceased to consider him; mothers with maturing