Armitage was back in New York, was eager to resume our old relations. But that could not be. I had outgrown him. And he, at the dangerous age, was allowing himself to harden into all the habits of the rich class and of middle life. Despite his efforts to conceal it, I saw that he had even reached the pass where a man of property regards a new idea as a menace to society. If it is a new invention, it may make some stock he owns worthless. If it is a new social or political idea it may make his laborers demand higher wages, or in some other way affect his dividends. And, of course, whenever a man speaks of a menace to society, he means a menace to himself whom he naturally regards as the most precious and vital thread in the social fabric. Compelled by my need for ideas to occupy me in supplement to the now thoroughly familiar and rather monotonous routine of investing and reinvesting, organizing and reorganizing, I was associating more and more with artists and writers of the sort who feel suffocated in the society of the merely rich. Material conditions force upon men inexorable modes of life. And every mode of life breeds a definite, distinct set of ideas. Men fancy themselves original because they suddenly discover certain ideas in their brains. As well might a hen who has just eaten hot bran fancy herself original because she laid an egg. The idea was not from the man, but from his material conditions--lawyer idea, politician idea, banker idea, anarchist idea, big or little merchant idea, dog-fighter idea, professor idea, preacher idea, and so on. I was fighting to escape this to me repellent molding process--and I was making headway. But poor Armitage was rapidly yielding; his struggle, I fear, had been in its best days in large part a brassy make-believe--the valor of the trumpet, not of the sword. He was a sorry sight. His once handsome face was taking on that petty, pinched, frost-bitten Fifth Avenue expression. And he had been driven for companionship into forming the familiar parasite circle. The chief figures in it were a decaying dandy of an old New York family who had been fawner and crumb snapper all his days, and a broken-down plutocrat who had squandered his fortune on fine women, fine wine, and fine food. The dandy gave Bob the fashionable gossip; the broken-down plutocrat gave him the gossip and scandal of the giddy part of town, also the latest gamey stories; also he--perhaps both--arranged for him the peculiar pleasures of the rich man with the palate that needs strong sensations to make it respond. Armitage was out of the question for me. Then---- I drifted into the Amsterdam Club one evening--to write a note or send a telegram--and there sat Hartley Beechman. The instant he saw me he sprang up and made straight for me. His expression was puzzling, but not hostile--still, I was unobtrusively ready. Said he in a straight, frank fashion: