At eleven o'clock on Monday morning James, head of the Fanning-Smith family, president of Fanning-Smith and Company, and chairman of the Great Lakes and Gulf railway--to note his chief titles to eminence up-town and down--was seated in his grandfather's office, in his grandfather's chair, at his grandfather's desk. Above his head hung his grandfather's portrait; and he was a slightly modernized reproduction of it. As he was thus in every outward essential his grandfather over again, he and his family and the social and business world assumed that he was the reincarnation of the crafty old fox who first saw the light of day through the chinks in a farm-hand's cottage in Maine and last saw it as it sifted through the real-lace curtains of his gorgeous bedroom in his great Madison Avenue mansion. But in fact James was only physically and titularly the representative of his grandfather. Actually he was typical of the present generation of Fanning-Smiths--a self-intoxicated, stupid and pretentious generation; a polo-playing and racing and hunting, a yachting and palace-dwelling and money-scattering generation; a business-despising and business-neglecting, an old-world aristocracy-imitating generation. He moved pompously through his two worlds, fashion and business, deceiving himself completely, every one else except his wife more or less, her not at all--but that was the one secret she kept. James was the husband of Herron's daughter by his first wife, and Herron had induced him to finance the syndicate that had raided and captured National Woolens. James was bred to conservatism. His timidity was of that wholesome strength which so often saves chuckle-heads from the legitimate consequences of their vanity and folly. But the spectacle of huge fortunes, risen overnight before the wands of financial magicians whose abilities he despised when he compared them with his own, was too much for timidity. He had been born with a large vanity, and it had been stuffed from his babyhood by all around him until it was become as abnormal as the liver of a Strasburg goose--and as supersensitive. It suffered acutely as these Jacks went climbing up their bean-stalk wealth to heights of magnificence from which the establishments and equipages of the Fanning-Smiths must seem poor to shabbiness. He sneered at them as "vulgar new-comers"; he professed abhorrence of their ostentation. But he--and Gertrude, his wife--envied them, talked of them constantly, longed to imitate, to surpass them. In the fullness of time his temptation came. He shivered, shrank, leaped headlong--his wife pushing.