“‘If there’s any handicap at all,’ says Andy, ’it’s our own refinement and inherent culture.  Pittsburg millionaires are a fine body of plain, wholehearted, unassuming, democratic men.

“’They are rough but uncivil in their manners, and though their ways are boisterous and unpolished, under it all they have a great deal of impoliteness and discourtesy.  Nearly every one of ’em rose from obscurity,’ says Andy, ’and they’ll live in it till the town gets to using smoke consumers.  If we act simple and unaffected and don’t go too far from the saloons and keep making a noise like an import duty on steel rails we won’t have any trouble in meeting some of ’em socially.’

“Well Andy and me drifted about town three or four days getting our bearings.  We got to knowing several millionaires by sight.

“One used to stop his automobile in front of our hotel and have a quart of champagne brought out to him.  When the waiter opened it he’d turn it up to his mouth and drink it out of the bottle.  That showed he used to be a glassblower before he made his money.

“One evening Andy failed to come to the hotel for dinner.  About 11 o’clock he came into my room.

“‘Landed one, Jeff,’ says he.  ’Twelve millions.  Oil, rolling mills, real estate and natural gas.  He’s a fine man; no airs about him.  Made all his money in the last five years.  He’s got professors posting him up now in education—­art and literature and haberdashery and such things.

“’When I saw him he’d just won a bet of $10,000 with a Steel Corporation man that there’d be four suicides in the Allegheny rolling mills to-day.  So everybody in sight had to walk up and have drinks on him.  He took a fancy to me and asked me to dinner with him.  We went to a restaurant in Diamond alley and sat on stools and had a sparkling Moselle and clam chowder and apple fritters.

“’Then he wanted to show me his bachelor apartment on Liberty street.  He’s got ten rooms over a fish market with privilege of the bath on the next floor above.  He told me it cost him $18,000 to furnish his apartment, and I believe it.

“’He’s got $40,000 worth of pictures in one room, and $20,000 worth of curios and antiques in another.  His name’s Scudder, and he’s 45, and taking lessons on the piano and 15,000 barrels of oil a day out of his wells.’

“‘All right,’ says I.  ’Preliminary canter satisfactory.  But, kay vooly, voo?  What good is the art junk to us?  And the oil?’

“‘Now, that man,’ says Andy, sitting thoughtfully on the bed, ’ain’t what you would call an ordinary scutt.  When he was showing me his cabinet of art curios his face lighted up like the door of a coke oven.  He says that if some of his big deals go through he’ll make J. P. Morgan’s collection of sweatshop tapestry and Augusta, Me., beadwork look like the contents of an ostrich’s craw thrown on a screen by a magic lantern.

“‘And then he showed me a little carving,’ went on Andy, ’that anybody could see was a wonderful thing.  It was something like 2,000 years old, he said.  It was a lotus flower with a woman’s face in it carved out of a solid piece of ivory.