Meantime a discussion upon society in general and other things in particular, something like that of Haviland and Townley, was going on in the back shop of the little brick store upon Sixth Avenue. A certain James Starbuck had lodgings there with his sister; that is, he was usually there when he was in New York. But this his occupation seldom permitted; for he was employed as a sort of small paymaster or inspector of the great Allegheny Central Company, a corporation which owned coal-mines, oil-wells, pipe-lines, factories, bonds, stocks, and other contracts so complex that the mind of even its owner grew confused at thinking of it. Starbuck was a slender, pale, narrow-chested American mechanic, whose bright eyes contrasted strikingly with his feeble frame and stooping shoulders, and whose sharp look betokened an unhealthy intelligence. His work was one which did not, however, require manual exertion, and he did it faithfully. His sister Jenny was very different in appearance; handsome, fond of pleasure, high spirited, they had only their cleverness in common.--But with Jenny’s case we have nothing to do. Of course, the reader, on the alert for coincidences and dovetailings of plot (as one always is in a novel, however veracious) has noticed that the name of Starbuck is not strange to this story; and has smiled to himself, superior, as his sagacity foresaw a link of connection in this fact. But was James Starbuck a cousin of clever, fashionable, refined Flossie? Starbuck did not know it. What, in active, progressive America, in the migrating America of the last fifty years, need a man know of his antecedents? They go for little in his life. Starbuck remembered his father well enough; and how he had struggled from pillar to post, from one frowzy city street to another, with the jaded, tawdry woman who was his wife; until one day, from a new and prosperous little city in the oil regions of Pennsylvania, he had gone, never to be seen or heard of after, by wife or child. And there they had lived, as they had been left there; and his mother took to dress-making and a boarding-house for miners, and his pretty sister had been sent to the public schools, and he had found work with the Company. His sister went through the High School, and then came home discontented; she could not bear their mode of life, nor like her mother’s boarders--great hulking fellows who came home at night grimy from the wells and mines, and were, at best, but laboring-men, though they had money enough. Then her mother had died; and her brother had proved unequal to the actual labor of the business; but his quickness, his Yankee intelligence, had not gone unobserved, and he had been given this sort of clerkship or travelling agency, which made it possible for him to live at either end of the line. But he could not support her yet, though she persuaded him to move to New York; and she quickly found a place with Rose Marie, who