Mr. Richard Wingfield, unjustly called the Cynic, was suspected of literary ambitions; but the suspicion was based upon nothing weightier than a brochure on golf which he had printed at his own expense for private circulation, and a study of the Greater City, abounding in sly ironies, which had appeared with illustrations in a popular periodical. Wingfield, if we may enter briefly into particulars, was tall and thin, with a close-cropped beard and dark hair combed to the smoothness of onion-skin. He was near-sighted, and his twinkling eye-glasses were protected by a slight gold chain. His aspect was severe, his manner disconcertingly serious. He carried, in all weathers, an umbrella whose handle bore on a silver plate the anticipatory legend, “Stolen from Richard Wingfield.” He was on many committees; he gave luncheons for actors, lecturers and other distinguished visitors; he attended the opera in New York and was reported now and then to be engaged to a prima donna. He patronized a private gymnasium and was a capital fencer. He cultivated the society of physicians, discussing the latest discoveries of Vienna and Paris in sophisticated terminology; he sat in the amphitheatre at surgical clinics, inscrutable and grave. His interest in medicine gave rise to the belief about the Club that he suffered from an incurable malady; but his medical cronies declared that he was as sound as wheat and would live forever. He affected an air of not caring greatly; he uttered paradoxes and enjoyed mystifying people; he quizzed likely subjects and had never been known to laugh aloud. It was he who first announced that five generations constitute an old family in Pittsburg. Practical men called Wingfield a loafer; others insinuated that his private life would not bear scrutiny. (A man who drinks nothing but koumiss in a club famed for its rye essences is sure to be the victim of calumny.) There was a particular little table in the corner of the Allequippa Club’s smoking-room--a room where all branches of human endeavour were represented at five o’clock every afternoon, from the twisting of stogies up through the professions to the canning of entrées--there, at his own little table, sat Mr. Wingfield, watching, as he said, the best men of the Greater City at the light-hearted occupation of hardening their arteries.