This fortunate gentleman began life as a boy who swept out a public lavatory in New York, and this accounts for his turning his attention to hardware. When he had made this colossal fortune he set about spending it, though he had no chance of spending it as quickly as it came in, and with a view to this bought a large chocolate-coloured house in Fifth Avenue, a cottage at Newport, an immense steam-yacht, a complete train in which to go on his journeys, and ordered a few dozen of Raphael’s pictures and some Gobelin tapestry. He was never quite certain whether Gobelin had painted the pictures and the firm of Raphael the tapestry, but that did not matter, since he had them both. He then expected his wife to get him into the very best New York society, and enter the charmed circle of the Four Hundred. She had been his typewriter, and in a fit of moral weakness, of which he had never repented, since she suited him extremely well, he had married her. But whether it was that the Four Hundred had seen too much of Mr. Whitehand’s name on their slop-basins, or whether he had not bought sufficient Raphaels, they one and all turned their ivory shoulders on him and his wife, and banged the door in their faces. As Mrs. Whitehand had just as keen a desire to shine among the stars of the amazing city as her husband, she was naturally much annoyed at her inability to climb into the firmament, the more so because she was convinced that with practice she could become a first-rate climber. She had the indomitable will and the absolute imperviousness to rebuffs that are the birthright of that agile race, and felt the inward sense of her royalty in this respect, as might some Princess over whom a wizard had cast a spell. But somehow, here in New York, she got no practice in climbing, because she could make no beginning whatever. She could only stand on tiptoe, which is a very different matter. And when at the end of her second year of standing on tiptoe, Nittie Vandercrump, the acknowledged queen of Newport, cut her dead for the seventeenth time, and with her famous scream asked her friend, Nancy Costersnatch, who all those strange faces belonged to, Mrs. Whitehand began to think that New York was impregnable by direct assault. But in the manner of Benjamin Disraeli, she vowed that some day she would attract attention in that assembly, and with Nittie Vandercrump’s scream ringing in her ears, sat down to think.