“But how did you come out of it?  How did you succeed?  For you have succeeded beyond your dreams, haven’t you?”

“Beyond my dreams?” He threw back his big, bright head, laughing happily.  “Did any man alive ever succeed beyond his dreams?  Why, I used to dream of being President, and I guess I shan’t be President this side of the Great Divide, shall I?  But I made money, if that’s what you mean.  Why, I have a million to-day to every dollar I had when I was twenty.  Do you mind my smoking?  I can’t talk unless I’ve got hold of a cigar.”

While he struck a match, she noticed with surprise how very neat and orderly he was about the ashes of his cigars, which lay in an exact gray heap in the massive bronze ash-tray.  What a pity, she thought, moved by a feeling of compassion, that he had had no advantages!

“I’ll tell you how I got on,” he pursued after a minute, leaning forward with the cigar in his hand—­it was a good cigar, she knew from the smell of it.  “Do you see this room?”—­he glanced proudly about him—­“do you know why I keep this place even when I am in the West?” She shook her head, and he went on with a kind of half-ashamed, whimsical tenderness:  “Well, a man lived here once you never heard of—­a common Irishman—­just a common Irish politician—­the Tammany sort, just the sort the newspapers are so down on.  I guess he wasn’t strong on civic morality as they call it, and the social conscience and all the other new-fashion catchwords, but he found me out there in the snow one night selling newspapers without any overcoat, and he brought me in and gave me one of his.  He was a little fellow—­not big as the Irish usually grow—­and I could wear his clothes, though I wasn’t thirteen at the time.  The coat wasn’t an old one, either,” he explained with retrospective complacency; “no, sirree, he had just bought it, and he made me take it off after I’d tried it on and sit down at the table in that back room there—­it’s all just as he left it—­and eat supper with him—­the best supper I ever had in my life before or since, you may take my word for it.  Then when I’d finished he gave me a dollar and told me to go out and rent a bed—­” He broke off, glanced about the room with the pride of ownership, and added softly:  “Who’d ever have thought on that night that this place would one day belong to me?”

“Did you see him again?”

“After that he never lost sight of me.  He got me a room, he sent me to school—­not that he thought much of education, the more’s the pity—­and when I was through with school he got me into the Mechanics’ Institute, and gave me a job at engineering.  But the job was too small for me, and so was New York—­there ain’t room enough here to get on without stepping on somebody’s toes—­and when I was twenty I set out to beat my way to Chicago, and went clean out to Arizona.  That’s a long story—­I’ll tell you that some day, for I’ve been everything on earth you can be in order to keep alive, and done