I often found my club a convenience, for in those busiest days of my financial career I had much private conferring--or conspiring, if you choose. Never had I found it so convenient as when for the first time there was pain and shrinking at the thought of going home, of seeing my wife and Margot. My Margot! When she was a baby how proudly I had wheeled her along the sidewalks of Passaic in the showy perambulator we bought for her--and the twenty-five dollars it cost loomed mighty big even to Edna. And in Brooklyn, what happy Sundays Edna and I had had with her, when I would hire a buggy at the livery stable round the corner and we would go out for the day to some Long Island woods; or when we would take her down to the respectable end of Coney Island to dig in the sand and to wade after the receding tide. My Margot! No longer mine; never again to be mine. One evening I had an appointment at the Amsterdam with a Western millionaire, Charles Murdock, whom I had interested in a Canada railway to tap a Hudson Bay spruce forest. He was having trouble with his wife and something of it had come out in the afternoon newspapers. At the last moment his secretary--who, by the way, afterwards married the divorced Mrs. Murdock--telephoned that Murdock could not keep his engagement to dine. I looked about for some one to help me eat the dinner I had ordered. There are never many disengaged men in the Amsterdam. The fashionable rich come only when they have business with the pariahs. The pariahs prefer their own houses or the barrooms and cafés of the big hotels. I therefore thought myself lucky when I found Bob Armitage sulking in a huge leather chair and got him to share my dinner. Armitage was one of my railway directors. He had helped me carry through the big stroke that made me, had joined in half a dozen of my enterprises in all of which I had been successful. There was no man of my acquaintance I knew and liked so well as Armitage. Yet it had so happened that we had never talked much with each other, except about business. It promised to be a silent dinner. He was as deep in his thoughts as I was in mine--and our faces showed that neither of us was cogitating anything cheerful. On impulse I suddenly said: “Bob, do you know about fashionable New York society?” I knew that he did; that is to say, I had often heard he was one of the heavy swells, having all three titles to fashion--wealth, birth, and marriage. But I now pretended ignorance of the fact; when you wish to inform yourself thoroughly on a subject you should always select an expert, tell him you know nothing and bid him enlighten you from the alphabet up. “Why do you ask?” said Armitage. “Do you want to get in? I had a notion you didn’t care for society--you and your wife.” Armitage didn’t go to Holy Cross, but to St. Bartholomew’s. So he had never known of my wife’s activities, knew only the sort of man I was.