From the outset of his career he owed his success, not alone to his personal beauty, but to his faculty for intuitively detecting the evil propensities of others, and for privately pandering to them, yet always preserving a show of indulgent charity withal. His medical practise opened to him the doors of certain social circles which would else probably have been forever closed to him. He practised medicine for a while at fashionable watering places, and he had many distinguished patients among the fair sex; at last, however, his marriage to a rich Russian girl relieved him from the necessity of pursuing his profession, and led his speculative mind into other paths. His wife's fortune, however, was soon but a small part of that which he accumulated and added to it. Always restless, often unprincipled, he heaped up his millions, seeming fairly to conjure money out of other men's pockets. His greed of gain was no petty passion, there was in it something of the heroic. Wealth was not his end, but a means to his end, a weapon,--power. In Paris this power had not failed him, but in Austria no one was dazzled by it except those towards whom he felt utterly indifferent. Day by day he grew more irritable, more bitter; what did his millions avail with these Austrian aristocrats who, had, with indolent elegance dragged after them for centuries, in spite of all levelling tendencies of any age, the burden of their ancient traditions--called by the Liberals prejudices--and who had grown weary at last of justifiable carping at their official and unofficial prerogatives, and had taken refuge upon an island as it were of determined exclusiveness, where, entrenched as behind the wall of China, they loftily ignored all the revolutionary hubbub around them. He had succeeded in much, why should he not succeed in making a breach in this wall of China? This was the aim of all his efforts. He was one of those who would fain destroy what they cannot attain. By a thousand enticing temptations he had striven to arouse the avarice of the _Right Honourables_, as he called them, that the base, degrading greed of gain might bruise the strict sense of honour that was like a 'hoop of gold to bind in' Austrian exclusiveness. To brand an aristocrat as a swindler would be a keener joy than to make him a beggar. He had hitherto had only a few petty triumphs in this direction, but he was too ambitious, too clear-sighted to be contented in the long run with these trifling victories. * * * One consciousness of terrible import to others had at times afforded Capriani some consolation, but of late even this consciousness had lost somewhat of its soothing charm.