"'Andy,' says I, as we strayed through the smoke along the cinderpath
they call Smithfield street, 'had you figured out how we are going to
get acquainted with these coke kings and pig iron squeezers? Not that
I would decry my own worth or system of drawing room deportment, and
work with the olive fork and pie knife,' says I, 'but isn't the entree
nous into the salons of the stogie smokers going to be harder than you
imagined?'
"'If there's any handicap at all,' says Andy, 'it's our own refinement
and inherent culture. Pittsburg millionaires are a fine body of plain,
wholehearted, unassuming, democratic men.
"'They are rough but uncivil in their manners, and though their ways
are boisterous and unpolished, under it all they have a great deal
of impoliteness and discourtesy. Nearly every one of 'em rose from
obscurity,' says Andy, 'and they'll live in it till the town gets to
using smoke consumers. If we act simple and unaffected and don't go
too far from the saloons and keep making a noise like an import duty
on steel rails we won't have any trouble in meeting some of 'em
socially.'
"Well Andy and me drifted about town three or four days getting our
bearings. We got to knowing several millionaires by sight.
"One used to stop his automobile in front of our hotel and have a
quart of champagne brought out to him. When the waiter opened it he'd
turn it up to his mouth and drink it out of the bottle. That showed he
used to be a glassblower before he made his money.
"One evening Andy failed to come to the hotel for dinner. About 11
o'clock he came into my room.
"'Landed one, Jeff,' says he. 'Twelve millions. Oil, rolling mills,
real estate and natural gas. He's a fine man; no airs about him. Made
all his money in the last five years. He's got professors posting him
up now in education--art and literature and haberdashery and such
things.
"'When I saw him he'd just won a bet of $10,000 with a Steel
Corporation man that there'd be four suicides in the Allegheny rolling
mills to-day. So everybody in sight had to walk up and have drinks on
him. He took a fancy to me and asked me to dinner with him. We went to
a restaurant in Diamond alley and sat on stools and had a sparkling
Moselle and clam chowder and apple fritters.
"'Then he wanted to show me his bachelor apartment on Liberty street.
He's got ten rooms over a fish market with privilege of the bath on
the next floor above. He told me it cost him $18,000 to furnish his
apartment, and I believe it.
"'He's got $40,000 worth of pictures in one room, and $20,000 worth of
curios and antiques in another. His name's Scudder, and he's 45, and
taking lessons on the piano and 15,000 barrels of oil a day out of his
wells.'
"'All right,' says I. 'Preliminary canter satisfactory. But, kay
vooly, voo? What good is the art junk to us? And the oil?'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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