“‘Good morning, Elihu,’ says she.

“‘Can’t stay long, Aunt Mary,’ I said.  ’Just want to leave you these.  Happy New Year!’

“Well, sir, you know I was just turning around and starting when she caught hold of my sleeve and says: 

“‘Elihu Burridge,’ she says, ‘give me that hand!’ and do you know, before I knew what she was about she took it up to her lips and kissed it!  Yes, she did—­kissed my hand!

“Now,” he said, drawing himself up, with eyes bright with intense feeling, “you know whether I’ve had my reward or not, don’t you?”

"Vanity, Vanity,” Saith the Preacher

Sometimes a single life will clearly and effectively illustrate a period.  Hence, to me, the importance of this one.

I first met X——­ at a time when American financial methods and American finances were at their apex of daring and splendor, and when the world was in a more or less tolerant mood toward their grandiose manners and achievements.  It was the golden day of Mr. Morgan, Senior, Mr. Belmont, Mr. Harriman, Mr. Sage, Mr. Gates, Mr. Brady, and many, many others who were still extant and ruling distinctly and drastically, as was proved by the panic of 1907.  In opposition to them and yet imitating their methods, now an old story to those who have read “Frenzied Finance,” “Lawless Wealth,” and other such exposures of the methods which produced our enormous American fortunes, were such younger men as Charles W. Morse (the victim of the 1907 panic), F. Augustus Heinze (another if less conspicuous victim of the same “panic"), E.R.  Thomas, an ambitious young millionaire, himself born to money, David A. Sullivan, and X——.  I refuse to mention his name because he is still alive although no longer conspicuous, and anxious perhaps to avoid the uncomfortable glare of publicity when all the honors and comforts which made it endurable in the first place are absent.

The person who made X——­ essentially interesting to me long before I met him was one Lucien de Shay, a ne’er-do-well pianist and voice culturist, who was also a connoisseur in the matters of rugs, hangings, paintings and furniture, things in which X——­ was just then most intensely interested, erecting, as he was, a great house on Long Island and but newly blossoming into the world of art or fashion or culture or show—­those various things which the American multi-millionaire always wants to blossom or bloom into and which he does not always succeed in doing.  De Shay was one of those odd natures so common to the metropolis—­half artist and half man of fashion who attach themselves so readily to men of strength and wealth, often as advisors and counselors in all matters of taste, social form and social progress.  How this particular person was rewarded I never quite knew, whether in cash or something else.  He was also a semi-confidant of mine, furnishing me “tips” and material of one sort and another in connection with the various