“You see!” confidentially said the speaker, between two mouthfuls of “hasty lunch,” “the house is bound not to speculate, but—Vreeland, as an individual, is to-day, perhaps the heaviest single operator of all the young men of New York.” The young man’s fame was duly noised abroad. “Where does he get all his backing?” grunted the other, as he dashed down a tankard of “bitter.” “He owns the half of Montana,” dreamily said the Mineralogical’s Cerberus. “And so, he is founded on the eternal rocks.” It was not half an hour until this brilliant new canard was traveling like a winged locust—and, it soon achieved the voyage—even to the jungles of Harlem—and spread all over Gotham like the Canada thistle attacking a poorhouse farm. A new financial Napoleon had appeared. The self-possessed Vreeland was astounded at the many offered social honors, the crowding attractive business temptations, and all the rosy lures now thronging his pathway. He knew not as yet the whole force of a lie “well stuck to,” which often treads down the modest and shamefaced truth. And even the agnostic sneer of “parvenu” was spared him. He was suave, careful, chary in making enemies, and strictly non-committal. His conduct toward Elaine Willoughby absolutely disarmed even that vigilant social scavenger, Mrs. Volney McMorris. For, many other men were just as often seen on parade in Elaine’s opera box. Senator Alynton, General Morehouse, U. S. A., Judge Arbuckle, and other social heavy guns oftener pressed the cushions of her victoria, or nestled under her sleigh robes. The Lady of Lakemere’s dinners were always stocked with a half dozen masculine “lions” of deep-toned and majestic growl. There were also two or three society swells—“howling swells”—who represented the “froth and foam,” and these young men, with vacuous smiles and heaven-kissing collars, impartially formed the “bodyguard” at theatre parties, and a gilded Spartan band, deftly “cleaned up” the debris of the midnight spread in the Waldorf supper room. Elaine had a peculiar fashion of segregating the lions and dudes, and sending each kind of social animal forth radiant with self-satisfaction, after a happy five minutes passed with her alone—in the pearl boudoir. So, calm and serene, Harold Vreeland duly came and went. Men wondered that he so freely stood back to let “other fellows take up the running,” and Augustus Van Renslayer sagely summed up the verdict of the younger “women hunters” of New York: “He is no marrying man. He lives in an eternal picnic of his own—up there—in the Elmleaf.” It was vaguely understood that Sardanapalus was Vreeland’s patron saint, and Bacchus and Nero his household gods. The charm had worked but too well. And the women of Gotham, those bright-eyed heart-wreckers, were all fain to agree with the catfish-eyed Van Renslayer. There was a fatal impartiality in the easy gallantry of the wary Princeton graduate.