He may have a streak of incurable folly in him. His effort to be “a man of the world” may draw him from discreet dissipation into that vortex which swallows up all weaklings not secured by great wealth. But let us suppose that he is not a weakling and that he keeps clearly in mind that at the basis of all success lies clear-headed, incessant industry. He works steadily at his business, commercial or professional; he shows capacity and is advanced; he is soon getting four or five thousand a year. At the same time he has prospered in what may be called the uptown end of his business; he has made acquaintances among the rich socially; several women of importance are interested in him and are telling their husbands and their husbands’ friends that he has brains. The men are seeing that the women are not mistaken. In any American city except New York or Chicago, our young man would now be regarded as a person of some consequence. In New York or Chicago he has merely reached the point at which he can, if he is sagacious, measure his insignificance. He has worked hard, but the real day’s toil has only begun. He has raised himself from the class that includes hundreds of thousands; but he is still in a class that includes tens of thousands. Perhaps this discourages him, makes him feel that he can never attain the paradise of multi-millionaires, or that, if he did attain it, he would be too exhausted to enjoy it. Perhaps experience has given him a clearer insight into the real meaning of his ambitions, and he is disgusted with their pettiness and sordidness, and begins to long for self-respect and decency and manhood. Perhaps his dream of success has been interrupted by a dream of sentiment. He may decide to marry and settle down--he has found New York drearily cold and lonely. In that event he gives up his bachelor apartments in the edge of the fashionable district; he is seen no more at his club--indeed, he has resigned from it; he is forgotten by his fashionable friends; he and his wife live obscurely in a flat or an apartment hotel far from the world of fashion, or in a cottage down in the country--a commuter’s cottage, as unlike as possible the multi-millionaire’s cottage of marble or limestone, of which he once dreamed. And as he is no longer of the world with which we are concerned, he drops out of sight--for the present.