pipe the moment he had put on his dressing gown and Turkey slippers.  He was well aware that popular treatises on the “Art of Behavior” and the “Code of Politeness” were extremely hard upon this disposition of the legs.  His half-sister, Philomela Wilkeson, who was high authority, had often visited his legs with the severest censure, when, upon suddenly entering the room where he was seated, she found the offending members confronting her from the top of the piano, or the table, or a chair, or sometimes from the mantelpiece.  While Marcus Wilkeson admitted the full force of her strictures as applied to legs in general, he claimed an exception for his legs, which were always in his own or other people’s way when they rested on the floor, or were crossed after the many fashions popular with the short-legged part of mankind.

Marcus Wilkeson’s heretical opinion concerning legs was part of a system of independent views which he entertained of life generally.  He had given up a profitable broker’s shop in Wall street, a year before, because he had made a fortune ten times larger than he would ever spend.  Having fulfilled the object for which he started in business, and for which he had toiled like a slave ten years, he conceived that nothing could be more sensible than to retire from it, make room for other deserving men, and enjoy his ample earnings in the ways which pleased him most, before an old age of money getting had deadened his five senses, his intellect, and his heart.

Persons who knew Marcus Wilkeson well were aware that he was a shy, self-distrustful fellow, amiable, generous, and that the only faults which could possibly be alleged against him were an excessive fondness for old books, old cigars, and profitless meditations, and a catlike affection for quiet corners.  And when his half-sister Philomela—­who had no hypocritical concealment about her, thank heaven! and always told people what she thought of them—­pronounced the first of those luxuries “trash,” the second “disgusting,” and the other two “idiotic,” he met her candid criticisms with a pleasant laugh, and said that, at any rate, they hurt nobody but himself.

To which Philomela invariably retorted:  “But suppose every strapping fellow, at your time of life, should take to novel-reading, and such fooleries, what would become of the world, I would like to know?”

And her brother, puffing out a long stream of smoke, would respond:  “Suppose, my dear sister, every woman was destined to be an old maid, as you are, what would become of the world, I would like to know?”

The conversation always terminated at this point, by Philomela declaring that coarse personality was the refuge of weak-minded people when they could not answer arguments, and that, for her part, she would never take the trouble to say another plain, straightforward word for his good; whereupon there would be a truce, lasting sometimes a whole day.