To the bank, then, the instant you read.  Cable me one thousand dollars, and be at the Rue Auber not more than ten days later.  To the bank!  Thence to the telegraph office.  Speed!  V. C.

He was in better spirits as he read over this letter, and he chuckled as he addressed it.  He pictured himself in the rear room of the bar in the Rue Auber, relating, across the little marble-topped table, this American adventure, to the delight of that blithe, ne’er-do-well outcast of an exalted poor family, that gambler, blackmailer and merry rogue, Don Antonio Moliterno, comrade and teacher of this ductile Valentine since the later days of adolescence.  They had been school-fellows in Rome, and later roamed Europe together unleashed, discovering worlds of many kinds.  Valentine’s careless mother let her boy go as he liked, and was often negligent in the matter of remittances:  he and his friend learned ways to raise the wind, becoming expert and making curious affiliations.  At her death there was a small inheritance; she had not been provident.  The little she left went rocketing, and there was the wind to be raised again:  young Corliss had wits and had found that they could supply him—­most of the time—­with much more than the necessities of life.  He had also found that he possessed a strong attraction for various women; already—­at twenty-two—­his experience was considerable, and, in his way, he became a specialist.  He had a talent; he improved it and his opportunities.  Altogether, he took to the work without malice and with a light heart. . . .

He sealed the envelope, rang for a boy, gave him the letter to post, and directed that the apartment should be set to rights.  It was not that in which he had received Ray Vilas.  Corliss had moved to rooms on another floor of the hotel, the day after that eccentric and somewhat ominous person had called to make an “investment.”  Ray’s shadowy forebodings concerning that former apartment had encountered satire:  Corliss was a “materialist” and, at the mildest estimate, an unusually practical man, but he would never sleep in a bed with its foot toward the door; southern Italy had seeped into him.  He changed his rooms, a measure of which Don Antonio Moliterno would have wholly approved.  Besides, these were as comfortable as the others, and so like them as even to confirm Ray’s statement concerning “A Reading from Homer”:  evidently this work had been purchased by the edition.

A boy came to announce that his “roadster” waited for him at the hotel entrance, and Corliss put on a fur motoring coat and cap, and went downstairs.  A door leading from the hotel bar into the lobby was open, and, as Corliss passed it, there issued a mocking shout: 

“Tor’dor!  Oh, look at the Tor’dor!  Ain’t he the handsome Spaniard!”

Ray Vilas stumbled out, tousled, haggard, waving his arms in absurd and meaningless gestures; an amused gallery of tipplers filling the doorway behind him.