ted the old Astor Library and the
Metropolitan Museum, learned something about pictures and porcelains,
took singing lessons, though he had a voice like a crow's. When he sat
down to his baked apple and doughnut in a basement lunch-room, he would
prop a book up before him and address his food with as much leisure and
ceremony as if he were dining at his club. He held himself at a distance
from his fellow-workmen and somehow always managed to impress them with
his superiority. He had inordinate vanity, and there are many stories
about his foppishness. After his first promotion in Rosenthal's factory,
he bought a new overcoat. A few days later, one of the men at the
machines, which Stein had just quitted, appeared in a coat exactly like
it. Stein could not discharge him, but he gave his own coat to a newly
arrived Russian boy and got another. He was already magnificent.

"After he began to make headway with misses' and juniors' cloaks, he
became a collector--etchings, china, old musical instruments. He had a
dancing master, and engaged a beautiful Brazilian widow--she was said to
be a secret agent for some South American republic--to teach him
Spanish. He cultivated the society of the unknown great: poets, actors,
musicians. He entertained them sumptuously, and they regarded him
as a deep, mysterious Jew who had the secret of gold, which they had not.
His business associates thought him a man of taste and culture, a patron
of the arts, a credit to the garment trade.

"One of Stein's many ambitions was to be thought a success with women. He
got considerable notoriety in the garment world by his attentions to an
emotional actress who is now quite forgotten, but who had her little hour
of expectation. Then there was a dancer; then, just after Gorky's visit
here, a Russian anarchist woman. After that the coat-makers and
shirtwaist-makers began to whisper that Stein's great success was
with Kitty Ayrshire.

"It is the hardest thing in the world to disprove such a story, as Dan
Leland and I discovered. We managed to worry down the girl's address
through a taxi-cab driver who got next to Stein's chauffeur. She had an
apartment in a decent-enough house on Waverly Place. Nobody ever came to
see her but Stein, her sisters, and a little Italian girl from whom we
got the story.

"The counterfeit's name was Ruby Mohr. She worked in a shirtwaist
factory, and this Italian girl, Margarita, was her chum. Stein came to
the factory when