to please him and to be in a position to get the benefit of his brains should need arise.  Norman’s whole career, like every career great and small, in the arena of action, was a derision of the ancient moralities, a demonstration of the value of fear as an aid to success.  Even his friends—­and he had as many as he cared to have—­had been drawn to him by the desire to placate him, to stand well where there was danger in standing ill.

Until dinner time he stood at the club bar, drinking one cocktail after another with that supreme indifference to consequences to health which made his fellow men gape and wonder—­and cost an occasional imitator health, and perhaps life.  Nor did the powerful liquor have the least effect upon him, apparently.  Possibly he was in a better humor, but not noticeably so.  He dined at the club and spent the evening at bridge, winning several hundred dollars.  He enjoyed the consideration he received at that club, for his fellow members being men of both social and financial consequence, their conspicuous respect for him was a concentrated essence of general adulation.  He lingered on, eating a great supper with real appetite.  He went home in high good humor with himself.  He felt that he was a conqueror born, that such things of his desire as did not come could be forced to come.  He no longer regarded his passion for the nebulous girl of many personalities as a descent from dignity.  Was he not king?  Did not his favor give her whatever rank he pleased?  Might not a king pick and choose, according to his fancy?  Let the smaller fry grow nervous about these matters of caste.  They did well to take care lest they should fall.  But not he!  He had won thus far by haughtiness, never by cringing.  His mortal day would be that in which he should abandon his natural tactics for the modes of lesser men.  True, only a strong head could remain steady in these giddy altitudes of self-confidence.  But was not his head strong?

And without hesitation he called up the vision that made him delirious-and detained it and reveled in it until sleep came.

VIII

The longer he thought of it the stronger grew his doubt that the little Hallowell girl could be so indifferent to him as she seemed.  Not that she was a fraud—­that is, a conscious fraud—­even so much of a fraud as the sincerest of the other women he had known.  Simply that she was carrying out a scheme of coquetry.  Could it be in human nature, even in the nature of the most indiscriminating of the specimens of young feminine ignorance and folly, not to be flattered by the favor of such a man as he?  Common sense answered that it could not be—­but neglected to point out to him that almost any vagary might be expected of human nature, when it could produce such a deviation from the recognized types as a man of his position agitated about such an unsought obscurity as Miss Hallowell.  He continued to debate the state of her mind as if it were an affair of mightiest moment—­which, indeed, it was to him.  And presently his doubt strengthened into conviction.  She must be secretly pleased, flattered, responsive.  She had been in the office long enough to be impressed by his position.  Yes, there must be more or less pretense in her apparently complete indifference—­more or less pretense, more or less coquetry, probably not a little timidity.