PART ONE:  THE MAN IN THE CASE

CHAPTER I

THE GRAY SEAL

Among New York’s fashionable and ultra-exclusive clubs, the St. James stood an acknowledged leader—­more men, perhaps, cast an envious eye at its portals, of modest and unassuming taste, as they passed by on Fifth Avenue, than they did at any other club upon the long list that the city boasts.  True, there were more expensive clubs upon whose membership roll scintillated more stars of New York’s social set, but the St. James was distinctive.  It guaranteed a man, so to speak—­that is, it guaranteed a man to be innately a gentleman.  It required money, it is true, to keep up one’s membership, but there were many members who were not wealthy, as wealth is measured nowadays—­there were many, even, who were pressed sometimes to meet their dues and their house accounts, but the accounts were invariably promptly paid.  No man, once in, could ever afford, or ever had the desire, to resign from the St. James Club.  Its membership was cosmopolitan; men of every walk in life passed in and out of its doors, professional men and business men, physicians, artists, merchants, authors, engineers, each stamped with the “hall mark” of the St. James, an innate gentleman.  To receive a two weeks’ out-of-town visitor’s card to the St. James was something to speak about, and men from Chicago, St. Louis, or San Francisco spoke of it with a sort of holier-than-thou air to fellow members of their own exclusive clubs, at home again.

Is there any doubt that Jimmie Dale was a gentleman—­an innate gentleman?  Jimmie Dale’s father had been a member of the St. James Club, and one of the largest safe manufacturers of the United States, a prosperous, wealthy man, and at Jimmie Dale’s birth he had proposed his son’s name for membership.  It took some time to get into the St. James; there was a long waiting list that neither money, influence, nor pull could alter by so much as one iota.  Men proposed their sons’ names for membership when they were born as religiously as they entered them upon the city’s birth register.  At twenty-one Jimmie Dale was elected to membership; and, incidentally, that same year, graduated from Harvard.  It was Mr. Dale’s desire that his son should enter the business and learn it from the ground up, and Jimmie Dale, for four years thereafter, had followed his father’s wishes.  Then his father died.  Jimmie Dale had leanings toward more artistic pursuits than business.  He was credited with sketching a little, writing a little; and he was credited with having received a very snug amount from the combine to which he sold out his safe-manufacturing interests.  He lived a bachelor life—­his mother had been dead many years—­in the house that his father had left him on Riverside Drive, kept a car or two and enough servants to run his menage smoothly, and serve a dinner exquisitely when he felt hospitably inclined.