Of them all, Ralph Addington was perhaps, the least popular.  This was strange; for he was a thorough sport, a man of a wide experience.  He was salesman for a business concern that manufactured a white shoe-polish, and he made the rounds of the Oriental countries every year.  He was a careful and intelligent observer both of men and things.  He was widely if not deeply read.  He was an interesting talker.  He could, for or instance, meet each of the other four on some point of mental contact.  A superficial knowledge of sociology and a practical experience with many races brought him and Frank Merrill into frequent discussion.  His interest in all athletic sports and his firsthand information in regard to them made common ground between him and Billy Fairfax.  With Honey Smith, he talked business, adventure, and romance; with Pete Murphy, German opera, French literature, American muckraking, and Japanese art.  The flaw which made him alien was not of personality but of character.

He presented the anomaly of a man scrupulously honorable in regard to his own sex, and absolutely codeless in regard to the other.  He was what modern nomenclature calls a “contemporaneous varietist.”  He was, in brief, an offensive type of libertine.  Woman, first and foremost, was his game.  Every woman attracted him.  No woman held him.  Any new woman, however plain, immediately eclipsed her predecessor, however beautiful.  The fact that amorous interests took precedence over all others was quite enough to make him vaguely unpopular with men.  But as in addition, he was a physical type which many women find interesting, it is likely that an instinctive sex-jealousy, unformulated but inevitable, biassed their judgment.  He was a typical business man; but in appearance he represented the conventional idea of an artist.  Tall, muscular, graceful, hair thick and a little wavy, beard pointed and golden-brown, eyes liquid and long-lashed, women called him “interesting.”  There was, moreover, always a slight touch of the picturesque in his clothes; he was master of the small amatory ruses which delight flirtatious women.

In brief, men were always divided in their own minds in regard to Ralph Addington.  They knew that, constantly, he broke every canon of that mysterious flexible, half-developed code which governs their relations with women.  But no law of that code compelled them to punish him for ungenerous treatment of somebody’s else wife or sister.  Had he been dishonorable with them, had he once borrowed without paying, had he once cheated at cards, they would have ostracized him forever.  He had done none of these things, of course.

“By jiminy!” exclaimed Honey Smith, “how I hate the unfamiliar air of everything.  I’d like to put my lamps on something I know.  A ranch and a round-up would look pretty good to me at this moment.  Or a New England farmhouse with the cows coming home.  That would set me up quicker than a highball.”