Financial agents admire Matthew Kerrigan. He is the sort of person who gives them no trouble. They are more cordial toward him than they are toward great bankers or great Wall Street men. For great bank-presidents and stock-manipulators wage terrific and lyrical battles on the terrain of commerce, and though there are great Leipzigs and Jenas, there are also great Waterloos. But Kerrigan is safe. He takes no chances. His factories in Yonkers purr, day in, day out, making by the million that simple fastening device for women's corsets that has made him several fortunes. "That's the way to make money," they will tell you. "Just hit upon something simple and necessary, like a hair-pin or a shoe-horn, that no other person has thought of. Make it and sell it to the public and bank your money in gilt-edged securities. Look at Matthew Kerrigan! And not fifteen years ago he was a clerk in an accountant's office." Along Broadway, too, he is known favorably, in that happy-go-easy circle of minor actors, wine-merchants, and women aspirants for the stage and movies. Head waiters are deferential, and slightly contemptuous toward him. He is a good spender, and yet-- There is something repulsive, unhealthy in the way he enjoys food and drink and looks at women. "Six things doth the Lord hate; yea, seven, which are an abomination unto him": and the first is haughty eyes. I cannot conceive that as denoting the light that shines from eyes lit from a sense of high and noble lineage, of chivalrous ideals, of just power. I translate it by the eyes of Matthew Kerrigan--those gray, full orbs which look about a room stating that there is no man present whose equal and superior Kerrigan is now. Eyes which tell you Kerrigan has money, and is prepared to spend money for what he wants. You know that man will get good measure for his money--shrewdness and sophistication gleam from them in a wary, reptilian way. "They may call this the Rube City," Morgenthal, the little real-estate broker, announced at the Elks' Club, "but, believe me, there 's one guy in town they can't put anything over on, and that's Kerrigan. He 's wise. I tell you, boy, he 's wise. Did you hear about that baby at the Winter Garden that tried to pull that hard-luck story on him? You didn't, eh? Well, let me tell you something: She got hers...." There is one other place you may collect facts about Matthew Kerrigan and that is the down-town lunch-rooms of the financial district--uncomfortable, clattering places where you eat on a high stool at a counter and compute the price of your meal to the cashier as you go out. There is a race of clerks there, old men, natty but shabby of dress, pinched in the face, gray-headed, stoop-shouldered. Some of them are bitter and many are garrulous. They specialize in the early histories of well-known men.