al his
grandfather over again, he and his family and the social and business
world assumed that he was the reincarnation of the crafty old fox who
first saw the light of day through the chinks in a farm-hand's cottage
in Maine and last saw it as it sifted through the real-lace curtains of
his gorgeous bedroom in his great Madison Avenue mansion. But in fact
James was only physically and titularly the representative of his
grandfather. Actually he was typical of the present generation of
Fanning-Smiths--a self-intoxicated, stupid and pretentious generation;
a polo-playing and racing and hunting, a yachting and palace-dwelling
and money-scattering generation; a business-despising and
business-neglecting, an old-world aristocracy-imitating generation. He
moved pompously through his two worlds, fashion and business, deceiving
himself completely, every one else except his wife more or less, her
not at all--but that was the one secret she kept.

James was the husband of Herron's daughter by his first wife, and
Herron had induced him to finance the syndicate that had raided and
captured National Woolens.

James was bred to conservatism. His timidity was of that wholesome
strength which so often saves chuckle-heads from the legitimate
consequences of their vanity and folly. But the spectacle of huge
fortunes, risen overnight before the wands of financial magicians whose
abilities he despised when he compared them with his own, was too much
for timidity. He had been born with a large vanity, and it had been
stuffed from his babyhood by all around him until it was become as
abnormal as the liver of a Strasburg goose--and as supersensitive. It
suffered acutely as these Jacks went climbing up their bean-stalk
wealth to heights of magnificence from which the establishments and
equipages of the Fanning-Smiths must seem poor to shabbiness. He
sneered at them as "vulgar new-comers"; he professed abhorrence of
their ostentation. But he--and Gertrude, his wife--envied them, talked
of them constantly, longed to imitate, to surpass them.

In the fullness of time his temptation came. He shivered, shrank,
leaped headlong--his wife pushing.

About ten days before the raid on National Woolens there had drifted in
to Dumont through one of his many subterranean sources of information a
rumor that the Fanning-Smiths had stealthily reduced their holdings of
Great Lakes to twenty-one thousand shares and that the property was not
so g