“Tell me about the Tammany Tiger, if you please,” he said once.  “I want to know what kind of an animal it is.”

From a point of view somewhat different from that of Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance, Betty Vanderpoel found talk with him interesting.  To her he did not wear the aspect of a foreign product.  She had not met and conversed with young men like him, but she knew of them.  Stringent precautions were taken to protect her father from their ingenuous enterprises.  They were not permitted to enter his offices; they were even discouraged from hovering about their neighbourhood when seen and suspected.  The atmosphere, it was understood, was to be, if possible, disinfected of agents.  This one, lying softly in the four-post bed, cheerfully grateful for the kindness shown him, and plainly filled with delight in his adventure, despite the physical discomforts attending it, gave her, as he began to recover, new views of the life he lived in common with his kind.  It was like reading scenes from a realistic novel of New York life to listen to his frank, slangy conversation.  To her, as well as to Mr. Penzance, sidelights were thrown upon existence in the “hall bedroom” and upon previously unknown phases of business life in Broadway and roaring “downtown” streets.

His determination, his sharp readiness, his control of temper under rebuff and superfluous harshness, his odd, impersonal summing up of men and things, and good-natured patience with the world in general, were, she knew, business assets.  She was even moved—­no less—­by the remote connection of such a life with that of the first Reuben Vanderpoel who had laid the huge, solid foundations of their modern fortune.  The first Reuben Vanderpoel must have seen and known the faces of men as G. Selden saw and knew them.  Fighting his way step by step, knocking pertinaciously at every gateway which might give ingress to some passage leading to even the smallest gain, meeting with rebuff and indifference only to be overcome by steady and continued assault—­if G. Selden was a nuisance, the first Vanderpoel had without doubt worn that aspect upon innumerable occasions.  No one desires the presence of the man who while having nothing to give must persist in keeping himself in evidence, even if by strategy or force.  From stories she was familiar with, she had gathered that the first Reuben Vanderpoel had certainly lacked a certain youth of soul she felt in this modern struggler for life.  He had been the cleverer man of the two; G. Selden she secretly liked the better.

The curiosity of Mrs. Buttle, who was the nurse, had been awakened by a singular feature of her patient’s feverish wanderings.

“He keeps muttering, miss, things I can’t make out about Lord Mount Dunstan, and Mr. Penzance, and some child he calls Little Willie.  He talks to them the same as if he knew them—­same as if he was with them and they were talking to him quite friendly.”

One morning Betty, coming to make her visit of inquiry found the patient looking thoughtful, and when she commented upon his air of pondering, his reply cast light upon the mystery.