The West makes much of its self-made men, and points to them with pride, whenever the self-making includes material gain. The god Success is enthroned on a new Olympus, and all are slaves to him; and when public teachers thunder at him, his humblest subjects smile at one another, and say that it is, no doubt, well enough to be reminded of such things occasionally, but that, after all, nothing succeeds like success. Life is a series of hazards, and we are all looking for the main chance. James Wheaton's code of morals was very simple. Honesty he knew to be the best policy; he had learned this in his harsh youth, but he had no instinct for the subtler distinctions in matters of conduct. Behind glass and wire barricades in the bank where he had spent so many of his thirty-five years, he had known little real contact with men. He knew the pains and penalties of overdrafts; and life resolved itself into a formal kind of accountancy where the chief thing was to maintain credit balances. His transfer from a clerical to an official position had widened his horizon without giving him the charts with which to sail new seas. Life had never resolved itself into capital letters in his meditations; he never indulged in serious speculation about it. It was hardly even a game for the soul to play with him; if he had been capable of analyzing his own feelings about it he would have likened it to a mechanical novelty, whose printed instructions are confusingly obscure, but with a little fumbling you find the spring, and presto! the wheels turn and all is very simple. He tore up the note with irritation and threw it into the waste paper basket. He called the Chinese servant, who explained that a boy had left it in the course of the morning and had said nothing about an answer. The Bachelors' did not usually muster a full table at Sunday dinner. All Clarkson dined at noon on Sunday, and most of the bachelors were fortunate enough to be asked out. Wheaton was not frequently a diner out by reason of his more slender acquaintance; and to-day all were present, including Raridan, the most fickle of all in his attendance. It had pleased Wheaton to find that the others had been setting him apart more and more with Raridan for the daily discipline they dealt one another. They liked to poke fun at Raridan on the score of what they called his mad social whirl; there was no resentment about it; they were themselves of sterner stuff and had no patience with Raridan's frivolities; and they were within the fact when they assumed that, if they wished, they could go anywhere that he did. It touched Wheaton's vanity to find himself a joint target with Raridan for the arrows which the other bachelors fired at folly.