The next time I go to one of those expensive shacks it will be just after I've had a hearty dinner. Even at that I may change my mind and go to a moving picture show. CHAPTER IV YOU SHOULD WORRY ABOUT GETTING A GOAT Hep Hardy's goat belongs to the chamois branch of that famous family. When it gets out it wants to leap from crag to crag. Hep's chamois got loose recently and, believe me, I never saw a goat perform to better advantage. For a long time Hep has been in love with Clarissa Goober, the daughter of Pop Goober, who made millions out of the Flower-pot Trust. Of late, however, Hep's course of true love has been running for Sweeney, and my old pal has been staring at the furniture and conversing with himself a great deal. [Illustration] On our way home night before last Hep and I dropped into the Saint Astormore for a cocktail, and at a table near us sat Pop Goober and something else which afterwards turned out to be a Prussian nobleman--the Count Cheese von Cheese. When Hep got a flash of these two his goat kicked down the door of its box-stall and began cavorting all over the Western Hemisphere. "Pipe!" he whispered hoarsely, "pipe Pop Goober and the human germ with him! It's a titled foreigner--honest it is! It can walk and say, 'Papa!' And it is trained to pick out a millionaire father-in-law at fifty paces!" "Why, what's the matter, Hep?" I inquired after the waiter had vamped. "Oh, I'm wise to these guys with the Gorgonzola titles all wrapped up in pink tissue paper and only $8 in the jeans," Hep rumbled, with a glare in the direction of the Count Cheese von Cheese. "Pop Goober certainly does make both ends meet in the lemon industry," he continued. "That old gink is the original Onion collector and he spends his waking hours falling for dead ones." Hep paused to bite the froth off a Bronx. His goat was at the post. "That driblet is over here to pick out an heiress and fall in love with her because he needs the money," Hep growled as his goat got away in the lead. "Every steamer brings them over, John, some _incognito_, some in dress suits, and some in _hoc signo vinces_, but all of them able to pick out a lady with a bank account as far as the naked eye can see. "It's getting so now, John, that an open-face, stem-winding American has to kick four Dukes, eight Earls, seven Counts and a couple of Princes off the front steps every time he goes to call on his sweetheart--if she has money. "When I go down into Wall Street, John, I find rich men with the tears streaming down their faces while they are calling up on the telephone to see if their daughter, Gladys, is still safe at home, where they left her before they came down to business. "Walk through a peachy palace of the rich on Fifth Avenue, and what will you find?