whom he appeared a kind of Napoleon of finance. I will confess that I
myself was a little dazzled by his careless opulence. When he took me
to dine with him he thought nothing of giving the head waiter a
sovereign as a guarantee of careful service, or of sending another
sovereign to the master of the orchestra with a request for some
particular piece of music which he fancied. He once confided to me
that he had brought off certain operations which had made him the
possessor of eighty thousand pounds. To me the sum seemed immense, but
he regarded it as a bagatelle. When I suggested certain uses for it,
such as retirement to the country, the building of a country house, the
collection of pictures or of a library, he laughed at me. He informed
me that he never spent more than a single day in the country every
year; it was spent in visiting his father at the old farm. He loathed
the quiet of the country, and counted his one day in the year an
infliction and a sacrifice. Books and pictures he had cared for once,
but as he now put it, he had 'no use for them.' It seemed that all his
eighty thousand pounds was destined to be flung upon the great roulette
table of stock and share speculations. It was not that he was
avaricious; few men cared less for money in itself; but he could not
live without the excitement of speculation. 'I prefer the air of
Throgmorton Street to any air in the world,' he observed. 'I am
unhappy if I leave it for a day.' So far as knowledge of or interest
in London went, he was not a whit better than poor shabby Arrowsmith.
His London stretched no further than from the Bank to Oxford Circus,
and the landmarks by which he knew it were restaurants and music-halls.

The man seemed so satisfied with everything about his life that it was
a kind of joy to meet him. The sourness of my own discontent was
dissolved in the alembic of his joviality. Yet it was certain that he
lived a life of the most torturing anxiety. There were recurring