o men of title, and one or two of the highest
social or commercial respectability, lent their names for some
inconceivable reason to grace the front page of the neatly-bound little
volume of rules which govern, or sometimes fail to govern, the conduct
of the corporation. Mr. Barter rubbed shoulders with young men--very
young men they were--who would one day have handles to their names, and
enjoy the control of considerable estates. He sat at the same table with
men whose birth and antecedents, like those of the immortal Jeames, were
shrouded in a mystery. He met men of his own position, who like himself
were desperately glad of being numbered in the same club society with
men eminent on the turf, or familiar in the gilded saloons of the great.
He liked to think of those gilded saloons; it might be interesting
to know what he thought they resembled--most probably a somewhat
old-fashioned earthly paradise of ormolu. He bragged indefatigably
of his club and the people whom he met there. He dated all his private
correspondence from it, and spent hundreds of daylight hours above the
ivories and the pasteboard.

At the time of that foolish and weak-willed Bommaney's disaster there
were two or three I.O.U.'s for sums much more considerable than he
could afford to part with in the hands of his fellow-members. Law is a
necessity to human society. Even a band of brigands can't hang together
without it. Debt, outside the club, was by no means a thing to be
harshly spoken of, but debt to a fellow-member was a literal millstone
round a man's neck, and would sink him out of sight in no time.

The elder Barter had gone over to the majority, despatched by that
street accident, and if the old man had known nothing of the young man's
courses, he had had it in his power to make him well-to-do. But he had
paid his debts once at least, and had more than once had occasion to
grieve over the boy's handling of the firm's money, and so had made his
will entirely in his wife's favour, leaving his son dependent upon her
good graces. The mother was disposed to be a little sterner than the
father had been. Perhaps if young Barter had dreaded her less poor
Bommaney's fallen notes might have been returned to him.

But, to get on with the story, the young man's chief creditor at the
club was one Steinberg, a gentleman whose time appeared to be absolutely
at his own disposal, though he was known by some of his fellow-members
to have an address in Hat