a reputable firm of stockbrokers in Throgmorton Street.  He rose rapidly, speculated largely and successfully for himself, became a partner, and was rich at thirty.  I used to meet him occasionally, for he never forgot that we had sat upon the same bench at school.  I can see him still; well-fleshed and immaculately dressed; his waistcoat pockets full of gold; a prop of music-halls, a patron of expensive restaurants; flashing from one to the other in the evening hours in swift hansoms; a man envied and admired by a host of clerks in Throgmorton Street to whom he appeared a kind of Napoleon of finance.  I will confess that I myself was a little dazzled by his careless opulence.  When he took me to dine with him he thought nothing of giving the head waiter a sovereign as a guarantee of careful service, or of sending another sovereign to the master of the orchestra with a request for some particular piece of music which he fancied.  He once confided to me that he had brought off certain operations which had made him the possessor of eighty thousand pounds.  To me the sum seemed immense, but he regarded it as a bagatelle.  When I suggested certain uses for it, such as retirement to the country, the building of a country house, the collection of pictures or of a library, he laughed at me.  He informed me that he never spent more than a single day in the country every year; it was spent in visiting his father at the old farm.  He loathed the quiet of the country, and counted his one day in the year an infliction and a sacrifice.  Books and pictures he had cared for once, but as he now put it, he had ‘no use for them.’  It seemed that all his eighty thousand pounds was destined to be flung upon the great roulette table of stock and share speculations.  It was not that he was avaricious; few men cared less for money in itself; but he could not live without the excitement of speculation.  ’I prefer the air of Throgmorton Street to any air in the world,’ he observed.  ’I am unhappy if I leave it for a day.’  So far as knowledge of or interest in London went, he was not a whit better than poor shabby Arrowsmith.  His London stretched no further than from the Bank to Oxford Circus, and the landmarks by which he knew it were restaurants and music-halls.

The man seemed so satisfied with everything about his life that it was a kind of joy to meet him.  The sourness of my own discontent was dissolved in the alembic of his joviality.  Yet it was certain that he lived a life of the most torturing anxiety.  There were recurring periods when his fortune hung in the balance, and his financial salvation was achieved as by fire.  When he sat silent for a moment, strange things were written on his face.  Haggard lines ran across the brow; the hollows underneath the eyes grew deep; and one could see that black care sat upon his shoulders.  There was a listening posture of the head, as of one apprehensive of the footfall of disaster, and though he was barely forty,