“The little teffil never knew where they come from,” said Grossensteck, “and so what matters it?”

“That’s Papa’s name in the slums,” said Teresa.  “Uncle Gingersnaps, because at all his stores they give away so many for nothing.”

“By Jove!” I said, “there are some nick-names that are patents of nobility.”

What impressed me as much as anything with these people was their loneliness.  Parvenus are not always pushing and self-seeking, nor do they invariably throw down the ladder by which they have climbed.  The Grossenstecks would have been so well content to keep their old friends, but poverty hides its head from the glare of wealth and takes fright at altered conditions.

“They come—­yes,” said Mrs. Grossensteck, “but they are scared of the fine house, of the high-toned help, of everything being gold, you know, and fashionable.  And when Papa sends their son to college, or gives the girl a little stocking against her marriage day, they slink away ashamed.  Oh, Mr. Dundonald, but it’s hard to thank and be thanked, especially when the favours are all of one side!”

“The rich have efferyting,” said Grossensteck, “but friends—­ Nein!”

New ones had apparently never come to take the places of the old; and the old had melted away.  Theirs was a life of solitary grandeur, varied with dinner parties to their managers and salesmen.  Socially speaking, their house was a desert island, and they themselves three castaways on a golden rock, scanning the empty seas for a sail.  To carry on a metaphor, I might say I was the sail and welcomed accordingly.  I was everything that they were not; I was poor; I mixed with people whose names filled them with awe; my own was often given at first nights and things of that sort.  In New York, the least snobbish of great cities, a man need have but a dress suit and car-fare—­if he be the right kind of a man, of course—­to go anywhere and hold up his head with the best.  In a place so universally rich, there is even a certain piquancy in being a pauper.  The Grossenstecks were overcome to think I shined my own shoes, and had to calculate my shirts, and the fact that I was no longer young (that’s the modern formula for forty), and next-door to a failure in the art I had followed for so many years, served to whet their pity and their regard.  My little trashy love-stories seemed to them the fruits of genius, and they were convinced, the poor simpletons, that the big magazines were banded in a conspiracy to block my way to fame.

“My dear poy,” said Grossensteck, “you know as much of peeziness as a child unporne, and I tell you it’s the same efferywhere—­in groceries, in hardware, in the alkali trade, in effery branch of industry, the pig operators stand shoulder to shoulder to spiflicate the little fellers like you.  You must combine with the other producers; you must line up and break through the ring; you must scare them out of their poots, and, by Gott, I’ll help you do it!”