This virginal girl, who imagined herself able to play with fire without burning her fingers, was providing him with most welcome amusement. And he needed it. He had been considerably bored of late--always a dangerous mood for him to fall into. He was thirty-one. For ten years he had paid far more than there had been any necessity to keep constantly amused, constantly interested. Thanks to a shrewd ancestor who had bought large tracts of land in a part of Manhattan which had then been untouched by bricks and mortar, and to others, equally shrewd, who had held on and watched a city spreading up the Island like a mustard plant, he could afford whatever price he was asked to pay. Whole blocks were his where once the sheep had grazed. Ingenuity to spend his income was required of Palgrave. He possessed that gift to an expert degree. But he was no easy mark, no mere degenerate who hacked off great chunks of a splendid fortune for the sake of violent exercise. He was too indolent for violence, too inherently fastidious for degeneracy. And deep down somewhere in a nature that had had no incentive to develop, there was the fag end of that family shrewdness which had made the early Palgraves envied and maligned. Tall and well built, with a handsome Anglo-Saxon type of face, small, soft, fair mustache, large, rather bovine gray eyes, and a deep cleft in his chin, he gave at first sight an impression of strength--which left him, however, when he spoke to pretty women. It was not so much the things he said,--light, jesting, personal things,--as the indications they gave of the overweening vanity of the spoiled boy and of a brain which occupied itself merely with the fluff and thistledown of life. He was, and he knew it and made no effort to disguise the fact, a typical specimen of the very small class of indolent bystanders made rich by the energy of other men who are to be found in every country. He was, in fact, the peculiar type of aristocrat only to be found in a democracy--the aristocrat not of blood and breeding or intellect, but of wealth. He was utterly without any ambition to shine either in social life or politics, or to achieve advertisement by the affectation of a half-genuine interest in any cause. On the contrary, he reveled in being idle and indifferent, and unlike the aristocrats of Europe he refused to catch that archaic habit, encouraged at Eton and Oxford, of relating everything in the universe to the standards and prejudices of a single class.