concluded that his wealth was beginning to change him. His brain
was so full of statistics, figures, and computations that it
whirled dizzily, and once he narrowly escaped being run down by a
cable car. He dined alone at a small French restaurant in one of
the side streets. The waiter marveled at the amount of black
coffee the young man consumed and looked hurt when he did not
touch the quail and lettuce.

That night the little table in his room at Mrs. Gray's was
littered with scraps of pad paper, each covered with an
incomprehensible maze of figures. After dinner he had gone to his
own rooms, forgetting that he lived on Fifth Avenue. Until long
after midnight he smoked and calculated and dreamed. For the first
time the immensity of that million thrust itself upon him. If on
that very day, October the first, he were to begin the task of
spending it he would have but three hundred and fifty-seven days
in which to accomplish the end. Taking the round sum of one
million dollars as a basis, it was an easy matter to calculate his
average daily disbursement. The situation did not look so utterly
impossible until he held up the little sheet of paper and ruefully
contemplated the result of that simple problem in mathematics.

It meant an average daily expenditure of $2,801.12 for nearly a
year, and even then there would be sixteen cents left over, for,
in proving the result of his rough sum in division, he could
account for but $999,999.84. Then it occurred to him that his
money would be drawing interest at the bank.

"But for each day's $2,801.12, I am getting seven times as much,"
he soliloquized, as he finally got into bed. "That means