mbling center which
should outrival Monte Carlo, had long since occurred to him as something
which might well spring up near New York. He and Angela had visited Palm
Beach, Old Point Comfort, Virginia Hot Springs, Newport, Shelter Island,
Atlantic City, and Tuxedo, and his impressions of what constituted
luxury and beauty had long since widened to magnificent proportions. He
liked the interiors of the Chamberlain at Old Point Comfort, and the
Royal Ponciana at Palm Beach. He had studied with artistic curiosity the
development of the hotel features at Atlantic City and elsewhere. It had
occurred to him that a restricted territory might be had out on the
Atlantic Ocean near Gravesend Bay possibly, which would include among
other things islands, canals or inland waterways, a mighty sea beach,
two or three great hotels, a casino for dancing, dining, gambling, a
great stone or concrete walk to be laid out on a new plan parallel with
the ocean, and at the back of all these things and between the islands
and the ocean a magnificent seaside city where the lots should sell at
so expensive a rate that only the well-to-do could afford to live there.
His thought was of something so fine that it would attract all the
prominent pleasure-lovers he had recently met. If they could be made to
understand that such a place existed; that it was beautiful, showy,
exclusive in a money sense, they would come there by the thousands.

"Nothing is so profitable as a luxury, if the luxury-loving public want
it," Colfax had once said to him; and he believed it. He judged this
truth by the things he had recently seen. People literally spent
millions to make themselves comfortable. He had seen gardens, lawns,
walks, pavilions, pergolas, laid out at an expense of thousands and
hundreds of thousands of dollars, where few would ever see them. In St.
Louis he had seen a mausoleum built upon the lines of the Taj Mahal, the
lawn about which was undermined by a steam-heating plant in order that
the flowers and shrubs displayed there might bloom all winter long. It
had never occurred to him that the day would come when he would have
anything to do with such a dream as this or its ultimate fruition, but
his was the kind of mind that loved to dwell on things of the sort.

The proposition which Winfield now genially laid before him one day was
simple enough. Winfield had heard that Eugene was making a good deal of
money, that his salary was twenty-five thousand