he explained that he was seeing with clearer
eyes his responsibilities as a steward of the Lord, that luxury was sinful,
that no man had a right to waste the Lord's money.

The general theory about him was that advancing years had developed
his natural closeness into the stingiest avariciousness. But my notion
is he was impelled by the fear of exciting envy, by the fear of
assassination--the fear that made his eyes roam restlessly whenever
strangers were near him, and so dried up the inside of his body that his
dry tongue was constantly sliding along his dry lips. I have seen a convict
stand in the door of his cell and, though it was impossible that any one
could be behind him, look nervously over his shoulder every moment or so.
Roebuck had the same trick--only his dread, I suspect, was not the officers
of the law, even of the divine law, but the many, many victims of his
merciless execution of "the Lord's will."

This state of mind is not uncommon among the very rich men, especially
those who have come up from poverty. Those who have inherited great wealth,
and have always been used to it, get into the habit of looking upon the
mass of mankind as inferiors, and move about with no greater sense of peril
than a man has in venturing among a lot of dogs with tails wagging. But
those who were born poor and have risen under the stimulus of a furious
envy of the comfortable and the rich, fancy that everybody who isn't rich
has the same savage hunger that they themselves had, and is ready to use
similar desperate methods in gratifying it. Thus, where the rich of the
Langdon sort are supercilious, the rich of the Roebuck sort are nervous and
often become morbid on the subject of assassination as they grow richer and
richer.

The door of Roebuck's house was opened for me by a maid--a man-servant
would have been a "sinful" luxury, a man-servant might be the hireling
of plotters against his life. I may add that she looked the cheap
maid-of-all-work, and her manners were of the free and fresh sort that
indicates a feeling that as high, or higher, wages, and less to do could
be got elsewhere.

"I don't think you can see Mr. Roebuck," she said.

"Take my card to him," I ordered, "and I'll wait in the parlor."

"Parlor's in use," she retorted with a sarcastic grin, which I was soon to
understand.

So I stood by the old-fashioned coat and hat rack while she went in at the
hall door of the back parlor. Soon Roebuck himself came