"How do I know?" said DeLancy miserably. "It was just playing around. Other men were crazy over her. I never meant to be serious in the beginning--and then--then I was caught." "Fred, old fellow, you've got to get hold of yourself. Will you let me butt in?" "I wish to God you would." That night Bojo sent a long letter off to Doris, who was staying in the Berkshires with Gladys Stone as a guest. As a result the two young men departed for a week-end of winter sports. On the Pullman they stowed their valises and wandered back into the smoker where the first person Bojo saw, bound for the same destination, was young Boskirk. CHAPTER XII SNOW MAGIC Boskirk and Bojo greeted each other with that excessive cordiality which the conventions of society impose upon two men who hate each other cordially but are debarred from the primeval instincts to slay. "He wouldn't gamble, he wouldn't take a risk! Oh no, nothing human about him," said Bojo to Fred, sending a look of antagonism at Boskirk, who was adjusting his glasses and spreading the contents of a satchel on the table before him. "The human cash-register!" said DeLancy. "Born at the age of forty-two, middle names Caution, Conservatism, and the Constitution. Favorite romance--Statistics." "Thank you!" said Bojo, somewhat mollified. "There was a young man named Boskirk Who never his duty would shirk,--" began DeLancy--and forthwith retired into intellectual seclusion to complete the limerick. The spectacle of Boskirk immersed in business detail irritated Bojo immeasurably. The feeling it aroused in him was not jealousy but rather a sense that some one was threatening his right and his property. A complete and insidious change had been worked in his moral fiber. The hazardous speculation to which he was now committed, which was nothing but the sheerest and most vicious form of gambling, the wrecking of property, would have been impossible to him six months before. But he had lived too long in the atmosphere of luxury, and too close to the master adventurers of that speculative day. Luxury had become a second nature to him; contact with men who could sell him out twenty times over had brought him the parching hunger for money. All other ideals had yielded before a new ideal--force. To impose one's self, making one's own laws, brushing aside weak scruples, planning above ridiculously simple and obvious schemes of legal conduct for the ordering of the multitude, silencing criticism by the magnitude of the operation--a master where a weak man ended a criminal:--this was the new scheme of life which he was gradually absorbing.