hastily away from the table.

Joe looked surprised at first, and then laughed at his friend's
retreating form. "Poor old fellow," he said, "drunk again. Must have had
something before he came in."

There was not a lie in all that Sadness had said either as to their
crime or their condition. He belonged to a peculiar class,--one that
grows larger and larger each year in New York and which has imitators in
every large city in this country. It is a set which lives, like the
leech, upon the blood of others,--that draws its life from the veins of
foolish men and immoral women, that prides itself upon its well-dressed
idleness and has no shame in its voluntary pauperism. Each member of the
class knows every other, his methods and his limitations, and their
loyalty one to another makes of them a great hulking, fashionably
uniformed fraternity of indolence. Some play the races a few months of
the year; others, quite as intermittently, gamble at "shoestring"
politics, and waver from party to party as time or their interests seem
to dictate. But mostly they are like the lilies of the field.

It was into this set that Sadness had sarcastically invited Joe, and
Joe felt honoured. He found that all of his former feelings had been
silly and quite out of place; that all he had learned in his earlier
years was false. It was very plain to him now that to want a good
reputation was the sign of unpardonable immaturity, and that dishonour
was the only real thing worth while. It made him feel better.

He was just rising bravely to swagger out to the theatre when Minty
Brown came in with one of the club-men he knew. He bowed and smiled, but
she appeared not to notice him at first, and when she did she nudged her