loneliness. Parvenus are not always pushing and self-seeking, nor
do they invariably throw down the ladder by which they have
climbed. The Grossenstecks would have been so well content to keep
their old friends, but poverty hides its head from the glare of
wealth and takes fright at altered conditions.

"They come--yes," said Mrs. Grossensteck, "but they are scared of
the fine house, of the high-toned help, of everything being gold,
you know, and fashionable. And when Papa sends their son to
college, or gives the girl a little stocking against her marriage
day, they slink away ashamed. Oh, Mr. Dundonald, but it's hard to
thank and be thanked, especially when the favours are all of one
side!"

"The rich have efferyting," said Grossensteck, "but friends--
Nein!"

New ones had apparently never come to take the places of the old;
and the old had melted away. Theirs was a life of solitary
grandeur, varied with dinner parties to their managers and
salesmen. Socially speaking, their house was a desert island, and
they themselves three castaways on a golden rock, scanning the
empty seas for a sail. To carry on a metaphor, I might say I was
the sail and welcomed accordingly. I was everything that they were
not; I was poor; I mixed with people whose names filled them with
awe; my own was often given at first nights and things of that
sort. In New York, the least snobbish of great cities, a man need
have but a dress suit and car-fare--if he be the right kind of a
man, of course--to go anywhere and hold up his head with the best.
In a place so universally rich, there is even a certain piquancy