Behind Maury Noble's attractive indolence, his irrelevance and his easy
mockery, lay a surprising and relentless maturity of purpose. His
intention, as he stated it in college, had been to use three years in
travel, three years in utter leisure--and then to become immensely rich
as quickly as possible.

His three years of travel were over. He had accomplished the globe with
an intensity and curiosity that in any one else would have seemed
pedantic, without redeeming spontaneity, almost the self-editing of a
human Baedeker; but, in this case, it assumed an air of mysterious
purpose and significant design--as though Maury Noble were some
predestined anti-Christ, urged by a preordination to go everywhere there
was to go along the earth and to see all the billions of humans who bred
and wept and slew each other here and there upon it.

Back in America, he was sallying into the search for amusement with the
same consistent absorption. He who had never taken more than a few
cocktails or a pint of wine at a sitting, taught himself to drink as he
would have taught himself Greek--like Greek it would be the gateway to a
wealth of new sensations, new psychic states, new reactions in joy
or misery.

His habits were a matter for esoteric speculation. He had three rooms in
a bachelor apartment on Forty-forth street, but he was seldom to be
found there. The telephone girl had received the most positive
instructions that no one should even have his ear without first giving a
name to be passed upon. She had a list of half a dozen people to whom he
was never at home, and of the same number to whom he was always at home.
Foremost on the latter list were Anthony Patch and Richard Caramel.