glanced at the bronze clock. "What!--ten minutes past nine!
Parkins, see if my cab is at the door. . . . Jack, you ride down
with me. I walked when I was your age, and got up at daylight.
Some difference, Jack, isn't there, whether you've got a rich
uncle to look after you or not." This last came with a wink.

It was only one of his pleasantries. He knew he was not rich; not
in the accepted sense. He might be a small star in the myriads
forming the Milky-Way of Finance, but there were planets millions
of miles beyond him, whose brilliancy he was sure he could never
equal. The fact was that the money which he had accumulated had
been so much greater sum than he had ever hoped for when he was a
boy in a Western State--his father went to Iowa in '49--and the
changes in his finances had come with such lightning rapidity
(half a million made on a tip given him by a friend, followed by
other tips more or less profitable) that he loved to pat his
pride, so to speak, in speeches like this.

That he had been swept off his feet by the social and financial
rush about him was quite natural. His wife, whose early life had
been one long economy, had ambitions to which there was no limit
and her escape from her former thraldom had been as sudden and as
swift as the upward spring of a loosened balloon. Then again all
the money needed to make the ascension successful was at her
disposal. Hence jewels, laces, and clothes; hence elaborate
dinners, the talk of the town: hence teas, receptions, opera
parties, week-end parties at their hired country seat on Long
Island; dances for Corinne; dinners for Corinne; birthday parties
for Corinne; everything, in fact, for Corinne, from manicures to
pug dogs and hunters.