Chase had been the representative of the American Government at Thorberg for six months.  He never fully understood why the government should have a representative there; but that was a matter quite entirely for the President to consider.  The American flag floated above his doorway in the Friedrich Strasse, but in all his six months of occupation not ten Americans had crossed the threshold.  As a matter of fact, he had seen fewer than twenty Americans in all that time.  He was a vigorous, healthy young man, and it may well be presumed that the situation bored him.  Small wonder, then, that he kept out of mischief for half a year.  Diplomatic service is one thing and the lack of opportunity is quite another.  Chase did his best to find occupation for his diplomacy, but what chance had he with nothing ahead of him but regular reports to the department in which he could only announce that he was in good health and that no one had “called.”

Chase belonged to the diplomatic class which owes its elevation to the influence of Congress—­not to Congress as a body but to one of its atoms.  He was not a politician; no more was he an office seeker.  He was a real soldier of fortune, in search of affairs—­in peace or in war, on land or at sea.  Possessed of a small income, sufficiently adequate to sustain life if he managed to advance it to the purple age (but wholly incapable of supporting him as a thriftless diplomat), he was compelled to make the best of his talents, no matter to what test they were put.  He left college at twenty-two, possessed of the praiseworthy design to earn his own way without recourse to the $4,500 income from a certain trust fund.  His plan also incorporated the hope to save every penny of that income for the possible “rainy day.”  He was now thirty; in each of several New York banks he had something like $4,000 drawing three per cent. interest while he picked his blithe way through the world on $2,500 a year, more or less, as chance ordained.

“When I’m forty,” Chase was wont to remark to envious spendthrifts who couldn’t understand his philosophy, “I’ll have over a hundred thousand there, and if I live to be ninety, just think what I’ll have!  And it will be like finding the money, don’t you see?  Of course, I won’t live to be ninety.  Moreover, I may get married and have to maintain a poor wife with rich relatives, which is a terrible strain, you know.  You have to live up to your wife’s relatives, if you don’t do anything else.”

He did not refer to the chance that he was quite sure to come in for a large legacy at the death of his maternal grandfather, a millionaire ranch owner in the Far West.  Chase never counted on probabilities; he took what came and was satisfied.

After leaving college, he drifted pretty much over the world, taking pot luck with fortune and clasping the hand of circumstance, to be led into the highways and byways, through good times and ill times, in love and out, always coming safely into port with a smiling wind behind.  There had been hard roads to travel as well as easy ones, but he never complained; he swung on through life with the heart of a soldier and the confidence of a Pagan.  He loathed business and he abhorred trade.