he air of
Throgmorton Street to any air in the world,' he observed. 'I am
unhappy if I leave it for a day.' So far as knowledge of or interest
in London went, he was not a whit better than poor shabby Arrowsmith.
His London stretched no further than from the Bank to Oxford Circus,
and the landmarks by which he knew it were restaurants and music-halls.

The man seemed so satisfied with everything about his life that it was
a kind of joy to meet him. The sourness of my own discontent was
dissolved in the alembic of his joviality. Yet it was certain that he
lived a life of the most torturing anxiety. There were recurring
periods when his fortune hung in the balance, and his financial
salvation was achieved as by fire. When he sat silent for a moment,
strange things were written on his face. Haggard lines ran across the
brow; the hollows underneath the eyes grew deep; and one could see that
black care sat upon his shoulders. There was a listening posture of
the head, as of one apprehensive of the footfall of disaster, and
though he was barely forty, his hair was white. What happened to him
finally I do not know. I missed him for a year or two; inquired at the
hotel where he had lived and found him gone; and I thought I read in
the sarcastic smile of the hotel-manager more knowledge than he was
willing to communicate. I imagine that he went down in some financial
storm, like ships at sea that are heard of no more; the Napoleon of
finance had somewhere found his Waterloo. The reflection is
inevitable; what had he got out of life after all? He had won neither
peace nor honour; he had known nothing of the finer joys or tastes; he
had enjoyed no satisfying pleasures; such triumph as he had known had
been the brief triumph of the gambler. Upon the whole I thought the
narrow tedious life of Arrowsmith the worthier.

Reflections of this nature are usually attributed to mere envy or
contempt of wealth, which is a temper not less sordid than a love of
wealth. For my part I can but profess that I feel for wealth neither
envy nor contempt. On the contrary, I love to imagine myself wealthy,
and I flatter myself--as most poor men do--that I am a person
peculiarly fitted by nature to afford a conspicuous example of how
wealth should be employed. I like to dramatise my fancies, and the
more impossible these fancies are, the more convincing is the drama
that can be educed from them. Thus I have several times built palace