"Not yet," he answered.

"He's a character," said she. "I've heard Davy tell about the first
time he struck New York--as a miner, with huge wads of greenbacks in
his pockets. He spent his money like a 'coal-oil Johnny,' as the
phrase is--a hundred-dollar bill for a shine, and that sort of
thing. And he'd go on the wildest debauches; you can have no idea of
it."

"Is he that kind of a man?" said Montague.

"He used to be," said the other. "But one day he had something the
matter with him, and he went to a doctor, and the doctor told him
something, I don't know what, and he shut down like a steel trap.
Now he never drinks a drop, and he lives on one meal a day and a cup
of coffee. But he still goes with the old crowd--I don't believe
there is a politician or a sporting-man in town that Johnny Price
does not know. He sits in their haunts and talks with them until all
sorts of hours in the morning, but I can never get him to come to my
dinner-parties. 'My people are human,' he will say; 'yours are
sawdust.' Sometime, if you want to see New York, just get Johnny
Price to take you about and introduce you to his bookmakers and
burglars!"

Montague meditated for a while over his friend's picture. "Somehow
or other," he said, "it doesn't sound much like the president of a
hundred-million-dollar corporation."

"That's all right," said Mrs. Billy, "but Price will be at his desk