scintillated more stars of New York's social set, but the St. James was
distinctive. It guaranteed a man, so to speak--that is, it guaranteed a
man to be innately a gentleman. It required money, it is true, to keep
up one's membership, but there were many members who were not wealthy,
as wealth is measured nowadays--there were many, even, who were pressed
sometimes to meet their dues and their house accounts, but the accounts
were invariably promptly paid. No man, once in, could ever afford, or
ever had the desire, to resign from the St. James Club. Its membership
was cosmopolitan; men of every walk in life passed in and out of
its doors, professional men and business men, physicians, artists,
merchants, authors, engineers, each stamped with the "hall mark" of
the St. James, an innate gentleman. To receive a two weeks' out-of-town
visitor's card to the St. James was something to speak about, and men
from Chicago, St. Louis, or San Francisco spoke of it with a sort of
holier-than-thou air to fellow members of their own exclusive clubs, at
home again.

Is there any doubt that Jimmie Dale was a gentleman--an INNATE
gentleman? Jimmie Dale's father had been a member of the St. James
Club, and one of the largest safe manufacturers of the United States, a
prosperous, wealthy man, and at Jimmie Dale's birth he had proposed his
son's name for membership. It took some time to get into the St. James;
there was a long waiting list that neither money, influence, nor pull
could alter by so much as one iota. Men proposed their sons' names for
membership when they were born as religiously as they entered them upon
the city's birth register. At twenty-one Jimmie Dale was elected to
membership; and, incidentally, that same year, graduated from Harvard.
It was Mr. Dale's desire that his son should enter the business and
learn it from the ground up, and Jimmie Dale, for four years thereafter,
had followed his father's wishes. Then his father died. Jimmie Dale had