doors into the blowy street.  Here the wind and rain revived him; the bank and its curt refusal were forgotten; he walked onward with only a smiling memory of his partner as in the old days.  He remembered how Stacy had burned down their old cabin rather than have it fall into sordid or unworthy hands—­this Stacy who was now condemned to sink his impulses and become a mere machine.  He had never known Stacy’s real motive for that act,—­both Demorest and Stacy had kept their knowledge of the attempted robbery from their younger partner,—­it always seemed to him to be a precious revelation of Stacy’s inner nature.  Facing the wind and rain, he recalled how Stacy, though never so enthusiastic about his marriage as Demorest, had taken up Van Loo sharply for some foolish sneer about his own youthfulness.  He was affectionately tolerant of even Stacy’s dislike to his wife’s relations, for Stacy did not know them as he did.  Indeed, Barker, whose own father and mother had died in his infancy, had accepted his wife’s relations with a loving trust and confidence that was supreme, from the fact that he had never known any other.

At last he reached his hotel.  It was a new one, the latest creation of a feverish progress in hotel-building which had covered five years and as many squares with large showy erections, utterly beyond the needs of the community, yet each superior in size and adornment to its predecessor.  It struck him as being the one evidence of an abiding faith in the future of the metropolis that he had seen in nothing else.  As he entered its frescoed hall that afternoon he was suddenly reminded, by its challenging opulency, of the bank he had just quitted, without knowing that the bank had really furnished its capital and its original design.  The gilded bar-rooms, flashing with mirrors and cut glass; the saloons, with their desert expanse of Turkey carpet and oasis of clustered divans and gilded tables; the great dining-room, with porphyry columns, and walls and ceilings shining with allegory—­all these things which had attracted his youthful wonder without distracting his correct simplicity of taste he now began to comprehend.  It was the bank’s money “at work.”  In the clatter of dishes in the dining-room he even seemed to hear again the chinking of coin.

It was a short cut to his apartments to pass through a smaller public sitting-room popularly known as “Flirtation Camp,” where eight or ten couples generally found refuge on chairs and settees by the windows, half concealed by heavy curtains.  But the occupants were by no means youthful spinsters or bachelors; they were generally married women, guests of the hotel, receiving other people’s husbands whose wives were “in the States,” or responsible middle-aged leaders of the town.  In the elaborate toilettes of the women, as compared with the less formal business suits of the men, there was an odd mingling of the social attitude with perhaps more mysterious confidences.