But to Arthur himself, this is a red-letter day. Not only that he looks forward with some of Mamie’s eagerness to the great ball, where he is to lead the cotillon--such homage is already paid his eminence and begins so soon to bore--he has more solid cause for his content than that. This day--this second of January--he has severed his subordinate connection with the house of Townley & Tamms, and gone in, as junior partner, with the new firm of Duval & De Witt, who, now that he has capital, naturally wishes to make more. Poor Arthur has little capital, and he has some debts; but he is allowed to put in what he has, and his experience, and may draw five thousand a year as a maximum, from the firm. On this, for the present, he can live quite comfortably; seeking, meanwhile, the other fruits of success, that in due time he may enjoy them, as his own. It was pleasant to walk by the old shop, which he had entered almost as an office-boy, and see Charlie Townley, his former mentor, sitting there alone; looking a bit troubled, too, as Arthur thought. He had stopped in and smoked a cigar with him the day before; Tamms was not there, and Charlie had seemed distrait, and complained of having had to work all that New Year’s day upon the balance-sheet. It is nine o’clock now, but we have two or three hours yet to wait. If we have seen all the friends we care about who are invited, suppose we look in on some of our acquaintance who are not? There is James Starbuck, for instance; he is to be found in the little back apartment on Sixth Avenue, where he pretends that his sister still lives, though she does not, and he has not seen her since that day at the race. The name Rose Marie is yet on the door; and James has written many a letter, beseeching, imploring, perhaps. He does not like to supplicate; nor, perhaps, does Jenny like to be sermonized; and her pretty head is now full of envy that she can never go to the great Duval ball, which she has been reading of so much in the papers. And many another pretty girl has read of it in the papers, too, by many a comfortable fireside; though Wemyss perhaps would call it a middle-class one; and learned there were “high people” in this country, too. But James and his friends have been discussing it; and it seems to them an impudent taunt of the monopolist, flaunted in the face of suffering labor; so illogical are they. It happens that this festivity comes just about the end of the first century of actual American independence; and it is very certain, at least, that there have not been so many dollars spent on any jamboree--as Simpson calls it--of all that time before. But surely, the harvest of a century should be greater than a one year’s crop in some new and oppressed colony? And the Duval fortune, made from a nation’s hair-oil and cosmetics, and multiplied, when welded to the mace of capital, in a hundred corporations, has but grown in proportion.