John Valiant stirred and laughed, a little self-consciously, for there had been drops on his face.

Presently he took a check-book from his pocket and began to figure on the stub, looking up with a wry smile. “To come down to brass tacks,” he muttered, “when I’ve settled everything (thank heaven, I don’t owe my tailor!) there will be a little matter of twenty-eight hundred odd dollars, a passÉ motor and my clothes between me and the bread-line!”

Everything else he had disposed of—everything but the four-footed comrade there at his feet. At his look, the white bulldog sprang up whining and made joyful pretense of devouring his master’s immaculate boot-laces. Valiant put his hand under the eager muzzle, lifted the intelligent head to his knee and looked into the beseeching amber eyes. “But I’d not sell you, old chap,” he said softly; “not a single lick of your friendly pink tongue; not for a beastly hundred thousand!”

He withdrew his caressing hand and looked again at the check-stub. Twenty-eight hundred! He laughed bleakly. Why, he had spent more than that a month ago on a ball at Sherry’s! This morning he had been rich; to-night he was poor! He had imagined this in the abstract, but now of a sudden the fact seemed fraught with such a ghastly and nightmarish ridiculousness as a man might feel who, going to bed with a full thatch of hair, confronts the morning mirror to find himself as bald as a porcelain mandarin.

What could he do? He could not remember a time when he had not had all that he wanted. He had never borrowed from a friend or been dunned by an importunate tradesman. And he had never tried to earn a dollar in his life; as to current methods of making a living, he was as ignorant as a Pueblo Indian.

What did others do? The men he knew who joked of their poverty and their debts, and whose hilarious habit it was to picture life as a desperate handicap in which they were forever “three jumps ahead of the sheriff”, somehow managed to cling to their yachts and their stables. Few of his friends had really gone “smash”, and of these all but one had taken themselves speedily and decently off. He thought of Rod Creighton, the one failure who had clung to the old life, achieving for a transient period the brilliant success of living on his friends. When this ended he had gone on the road for some champagne or other. Everybody had ordered from him at the start. But this, too, had failed. He had dropped out of the clubs and there had at last befallen an evil time when he had come to haunt the avenue, as keen for stray quarters as any pan-handler. Where was Creighton now, he wondered?

Across the avenue was Larry Treadwell’s brokerage office. Larry had a brain for business; as a youthful scamp in knickerbockers he had been as sharp as a steel-trap. But what did he, John Valiant, know of business? Less than of law! Why, he was not fit to smirk behind a counter and measure lace insertion for the petticoats of the women he waltzed with! All he was really fit for was to work with his hands!

He thought of a gang of laborers he had seen that afternoon breaking the asphalt with crowbars. What must it be to toil through the clammy cold of winter and the smothering fur-heat of summer, in some revolting routine of filth and unredeemable ugliness? He looked down at his supple white fingers and shivered.

He rose grimly and dragged his chair facing the window. The night was balmy and he looked down across the darker sea of reefs, barred like a gigantic checker-board by the shining lines of streets, to where the flashing electric signs of the theater district laid their wide swath of colored radiance. The manifold calls of the street and the buzz of trolleys made a dull tonal background, subdued and far-away.

To be outside! All that light and color and comfort and pleasure would hum and sparkle on just the same, though he was no longer within the circle of its effulgence—slaving perhaps, he thought with a twisted smile, at some tawdry occupation that called for no experience, to pay for a meal in some second-rate restaurant and a pallet in some shabby-genteel, hall bedroom, till his clothes were replaced by ill-fitting “hand-me-downs”—till by wretched gradations he arrived finally at the status of the dime seat in the gallery and five-cent cigars!

There was one way back. It lay through the hackneyed gateway of marriage. Youth, comeliness and fine linen, in the world he knew, were a fair exchange for wealth any day. “Cutlet for cutlet”—the satiric phrase ran through his mind. Why not? Others did so. And as for himself, it perhaps need be no question of plain and spinstered millions—there was Katharine Fargo!

He had known her since a time when she bestrode a small fuzzy pony in the park, cool as a grapefruit and with a critical eye, even in her ten years, for social forms and observances. In the intervals of fashionable boarding-schools he had seen her develop, beautiful, cold, stately and correct. The Fargo fortune—thanks to modern journalism, which was fond of stating that if the steel rails of the Fargo railways were set end to end, the chain would reach from the earth to the planet Saturn or thereabouts—was as familiar to the public imagination as Caruso or the Hope diamond. And the daughter Katharine had not lacked admirers; shop-girls knew the scalps that dangled from her girdle. But in his heart John Valiant was aware, by those subtle signs which men and women alike distinguish, that while Katharine Fargo loved first and foremost only her own wonderful person, he had been an easy second in her regard.

He remembered the last Christmas house-party at the Fargos’ place on the St. Lawrence. Its habituÉs irreverently dubbed this “The Shack”, but it was the nursling of folk who took their camping luxuriously, in a palatial structure which, though built, as to its exterior, of logs, was equipped within with Turkish bath, billiard-room and the most indefatigable chef west of St. Petersburg. The evening before his host’s swift motor had hooted him off to the station, as its wide hall exhaled the bouquet of after-dinner cigars, he had looked at her standing in the wide doorway, a rare exquisite creature—her face fore-shortened and touched to a borrowed tenderness by the flickering glow of the burning logs in the room behind—the perfect flower, he had thought, of the civilization in which he lived.

John Valiant looked down at the bulldog squatted on the floor, his eyes shining in the dimness. A little hot ripple had run over him. “Not on your life, Chum!” he said. “No shameless barter! There must be other things besides money and social position in this doddering old world, after all!”

The dog whined with delight at the voice and jumped up to lick the strong tense hand held down to him. “Do you know, old chap,” his master continued, “I’ve been handing myself a collection of cold marble truths in the last few weeks? I’ve been the prize dolt of the whole show, and you ought to have thrown me over long ago. You’ve probably realized it all along, but it has never dawned on me until lately. I’ve worn the blue ribbon so long I’d come to think it was a decoration. All my life I’ve been just another of those well-meaning, brainless young idiots who have never done a blessed thing that’s the slightest value to anybody else. Well, Chum, we’re through. We’re going to begin doing something for ourselves, if it’s only raising cabbages! And we’re going to stand it without any baby-aching—the nurse never held our noses when we took our castor-oil!”

It was folded down, that old bright page. Finis had been written to the rose-colored chapter. And even as he told himself, he was conscious of a new rugged something that had been slowly dawning within him, a sense of courage, even of zest, and a furious hatred of the self-pity that had wrenched him even for a moment.

He turned from the window, picked up his letters, and followed by the dog, went slowly up another flight to his room.