was Anthony Patch, brilliant, magnetic, the heir of many years and many
men. This was his world now--and that last strong irony he craved lay in
the offing.

With a stray boyishness he saw himself a power upon the earth; with his
grandfather's money he might build his own pedestal and be a Talleyrand,
a Lord Verulam. The clarity of his mind, its sophistication, its
versatile intelligence, all at their maturity and dominated by some
purpose yet to be born would find him work to do. On this minor his
dream faded--work to do: he tried to imagine himself in Congress rooting
around in the litter of that incredible pigsty with the narrow and
porcine brows he saw pictured sometimes in the rotogravure sections of
the Sunday newspapers, those glorified proletarians babbling blandly to
the nation the ideas of high school seniors! Little men with copy-book
ambitions who by mediocrity had thought to emerge from mediocrity into
the lustreless and unromantic heaven of a government by the people--and
the best, the dozen shrewd men at the top, egotistic and cynical, were
content to lead this choir of white ties and wire collar-buttons in a
discordant and amazing hymn, compounded of a vague confusion between
wealth as a reward of virtue and wealth as a proof of vice, and
continued cheers for God, the Constitution, and the Rocky Mountains!

Lord Verulam! Talleyrand!

Back in his apartment the grayness returned. His cocktails had died,
making him sleepy, somewhat befogged and inclined to be surly. Lord
Verulam--he? The very thought was bitter. Anthony Patch with no record
of achievement, without courage, without strength to be satisfied with
truth when it was given him. Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making
careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly,