let us say in the days when he was, according to the majority of the
daily press, a financial force working for the improvement of the
character of the people. I'll tell you how it came about.

At that time I used to know a podgy, wealthy, bald little man having
chambers in the Albany; a financier too, in his way, carrying out
transactions of an intimate nature and of no moral character; mostly with
young men of birth and expectations--though I dare say he didn't withhold
his ministrations from elderly plebeians either. He was a true democrat;
he would have done business (a sharp kind of business) with the devil
himself. Everything was fly that came into his web. He received the
applicants in an alert, jovial fashion which was quite surprising. It
gave relief without giving too much confidence, which was just as well
perhaps. His business was transacted in an apartment furnished like a
drawing-room, the walls hung with several brown, heavily-framed, oil
paintings. I don't know if they were good, but they were big, and with
their elaborate, tarnished gilt-frames had a melancholy dignity. The man
himself sat at a shining, inlaid writing table which looked like a rare
piece from a museum of art; his chair had a high, oval, carved back,
upholstered in faded tapestry; and these objects made of the costly black
Havana cigar, which he rolled incessantly from the middle to the left
corner of his mouth and back again, an inexpressibly cheap and nasty
object. I had to see him several times in the interest of a poor devil
so unlucky that he didn't even have a more competent friend than myself
to speak for him at a very difficult time in his life.

I don't know at what hour my private financier began his day, but he used
to give one appointments at unheard of times: such as a quarter to eight
in the morning, for instance. On arriving one found him busy at that
marvellous writing table, looking very fresh and alert, exhaling a faint