No profession naturally proposed itself to a man of his talents, and he had not the initiative to live as a free lance. His marriage, therefore, was one of these providential things which seemed to fit almost too exactly into the general scheme of life to be true. He met his wife when Mary Smith (after making all her inquiries at the Petheringtons’) had caught and branded that heiress: and the wife so branded was Sudie Benson, the daughter of so wealthy an American as made the traffic of London not infrequently halt for his convenience, and who rather more than two years before my story bursts open, had seen fit to bring the radiant girl to London. The two were forcibly introduced--I mean the boy and the girl--they understood from the first what their destiny was to be. She could find no fault in the society which swam round her and to which such a marriage would introduce her activities; he saw no drawback to the alliance save one or two mannerisms in his prospective father-in-law, which time might modify--or on the other hand, might not. Ole Man Benson, to give him once more the name by which he was known and hated in another sphere, from the first ten thousand[1] which by the age of forty-three he had laboriously accumulated in shredded codfish, had dealt not with things, as do lesser men, but with figures. He had gone boldly forward like a young Napoleon, using, it must be remembered, not only the money of others but very often his own as well. He had been born of Scotch-Irish parents, probably of the name of Benson, and certainly married in the First Baptist Church of Cincinnati not quite three-quarters of a century ago. He was the youngest child of a numerous family, and was baptized or named after the poet Theocritus, with a second or middle name of Chepstow, which in his signature he commonly reduced to its initial letter. Theocritus C. Benson, now familiar to the whole Anglo-Saxon race of every colour and clime, was of that type always rare but now, though rare, conspicuous, which can so organise and direct the acts of others as to bring order out of chaos, chaos out of order, and alternately accumulate and disperse fortunes hitherto unprecedented in the history of the world.