“It is absurd,” Edith had said one night after their return.  “It makes us ridiculous in the eyes of anybody but fools.”  And Jack had flared up about it, and declared that he knew what he could afford, and she had retorted that as for her she would not countenance it.  And Jack had attempted to pass it off lightly, at last, by saying, “Very well then, dear, if you won’t back me, I shall have to rely upon my bankers.”  At any rate, neither Carmen nor Miss Tavish took him to task.  They complimented him on his taste, and Carmen made him feel that she appreciated his independence and his courage in living the life that suited him.  She knew, indeed, how much he made in his speculations, how much he lost at cards; she knew through him the gossip of the clubs, and venturing herself not too far at sea, liked to watch the undertow of fashionable life.  And she liked Jack, and was not incapable of throwing him a rope when the hour came that he was likely to be swept away by that undertow.

It was remarked at the Union, and by the men in the Street who knew him, that Jack was getting rapid.  But no one thought the less of him for his pace—­that is, no one appeared to, for this sort of estimate of a man is only tested by his misfortunes, when the day comes that he must seek financial backing.  In these days he was generally in an expansive mood, and his free hand and good-humor increased his popularity.  There were those who said that there were millions of family money back of Jack, and that he had recently come in for something handsome.

But this story did not deceive Major Fairfax, whose business it was to know to a dot the standing of everybody in society, in which he was a sort of oracle and privileged favorite.  No one could tell exactly how the Major lived; no one knew the rigid economy that he practiced; no one had ever seen his small dingy chamber in a cheap lodging-house.  The name of Fairfax was as good as a letter of introduction in the metropolis, and the Major had lived on it for years, on that and a carefully nursed little income—­an habitue of the club, and a methodical cultivator of the art of dining out.  A most agreeable man, and perhaps the wisest man in his generation in those things about which it would be as well not to know anything.

Seated one afternoon in his favorite corner for street observation, by the open window, with the evening paper in his hand, in the attitude of one expecting the usual five o’clock cocktail, he hailed Jack, who was just coming down-stairs from a protracted lunch.

“I say, Delancy, what’s this I hear?”

“About what?” said Jack, sauntering along to a seat opposite the Major, and touching a bell on the little table as he sat down.  Jack’s face was flushed, but he talked with unusual slowness and distinctness.  “What have you heard, Major?”

“That you have bought Benham’s yacht.”

“No, I haven’t; but I was turning the thing over in my mind,” Jack replied, with the air of a man declining an appointment in the Cabinet.  “He offers it cheap.”