Wheaton's promotion to the cashiership had come in the spring; and shortly afterward he had changed his way of living in a few particulars. He had lodged for years in a boarding house frequented by clerks; a place where his fellow boarders were, among others, a music teacher, a milliner and the chief operator of the telephone exchange. He had not felt above them; their dancing class and occasional theater party had seemed fine to him. Porter now suggested that Wheaton should be a member of the Clarkson Club, and Wheaton assented, on the president's representation that "it would be a good thing for the bank." Vacant apartments were offered at this time in The Bachelors', as it was called, and he availed himself of the opportunity to change his place of residence. He had considered the matter of taking a room at the club, but this, after reflection, he rejected as unwise. The club was a new institution in the town, and he was aware that there were conservative people in Clarkson who looked on it as a den of iniquity,--with what justification he did not know from personal experience, but he had heard it referred to in this way at the boarding house table. He knew Raridan and the others at The Bachelors', but his acquaintance with them was of a perfunctory business character. When he moved to The Bachelors', Raridan, who was always punctilious in social matters, formally called on him in his room, as did also Captain Wheelock, the army officer then stationed in Clarkson on recruiting service. The others in the house welcomed him less formally as they chanced to meet him in the hall or on the stairway; they were busy men who worked long hours and did not bother themselves about the amenities and graces of life. His change to The Bachelors' was of importance to Wheaton in many ways. He saw here, in the intimacies of their common table, men of a higher social standing than he had known before. Their way of chaffing one another seemed to him very bright; they mocked at the gods and were not destroyed. Raridan was a new species and spoke a strange tongue. Raridan and Wheelock appeared at the table in dinner-coats, and after a few weeks Wheaton followed their example. Raridan, he knew, dressed whether he went out or not, and he established his own habit in this particular with as little delay as possible. The table then balanced, the smelter manager, the secretary of the terra cotta manufacturing company, and the traveling passenger agent of the Transcontinental Railroad appearing in the habiliments which they wore at their respective places of business, and Raridan, Wheaton and Wheelock in black and white. The humor of this division was not lost on the traveling passenger agent, who chaffed the "glad rag" faction, as he called it, until Raridan took up arms for his own side of the table.