Hugh, too, at the end of the three years (though his change had been more gradual), might always have lived on Riverside Drive and known club life since his salad days. Unlike his wife, who in the first flush of her good fortune had elected play as her life work, Hugh had turned his attention to work. Ambitious as he was, and before his first success with his invention with no outlet for it, he had not let grass grow under his feet since he had changed his cottage in Atwood for a house on Riverside Drive. Personal attention to the details of the manufacture of his invention had brought him in contact with business men of wealth and solidity and deep down Hugh Benton was not the sort of man to neglect what opportunity threw in his way. From manufacturing to Wall Street had been but a step. Had Hugh Benton’s lucky fairy been with him day by day to wave her magic wand, he could not have had more fortune in his ventures. His was not the story of the ordinary novice. It was the thousandth one that daily draws more and more grist to the mills of the “big men” who rule so autocratically in that small street called Wall;—the story that draws adventurers with all the fascination that fishermen who daily cast their lines off the bathing beaches know because of tales of a solitary tide runner that some time has been known to become unwary. So it was, that at the end of three years, Hugh Benton was a rich man. He was becoming richer. He might have been a blood relation of Midas, said those who had come eagerly to watch for a tip that might fall from his lips unguardedly, for in so short a time his had become the platitudinous but nonetheless expressive sobriquet of “Lucky Benton.” With success, came all that it usually implies. His, too, had become the pleasures of the rich. Almost without knowing it, so subtle had come the transformation, home no longer held the joys it once did for the former bank employee. Roadsters of high speed, cards at any of the many clubs where he had been eagerly welcomed, fishing and hunting expeditions from the base of a hundred-thousand-dollar “shack” in the Adirondacks had taken the place of more homely pleasures. It had all come about so easily too. Looking back in one of his few retrospective moods Hugh Benton smiled as he recalled the thought he would never accustom himself to New York. He smiled a bit disdainfully at his own small viewpoint when he remembered how once he had believed he would be content as a gentleman farmer.