ng who knew anything whatever about him. And this was his
career! It was for this that he had planned that memorable campaign, and
waged that amazing series of fortnightly battles, never missing victory,
never failing at any point of the complicated strategy, and crowning it
all with a culminating triumph which had been the wonder and admiration
of the whole financial world! A few score of menials or interested
inferiors bowed to him; he drove some good horses, and was attentively
waited upon, and had a never-failing abundance of good things to eat and
drink aud smoke. Hardly anything more than that, when you came to think
of it--and the passing usufruct of all these things could be enjoyed by
any fool who had a ten-pound note in his pocket!

What gross trick had the fates played on him? He had achieved power--and
where was that power? What had he done with it? What COULD he do with
it? He had an excess of wealth, it was true, but in what way could it
command an excess of enjoyment? The very phrase was a paradox, as he
dimly perceived. There existed only a narrow margin of advantage in
favour of the rich man. He could eat and drink a little more and a
little better than the poor man; he could have better clothes, and lie
abed later in the morning, and take life easier all round--but only
within hard and fast bounds. There was an ascertained limit beyond which
the millionaire could no more stuff himself with food and wine than
could the beggar. It might be pleasant to take an added hour or two in
bed in the morning, but to lie in bed all day would be an infliction. So
it ran indefinitely--this thin selvedge of advantage which money
could buy--with deprivation on the one side, and surfeit on the other.
Candidly, was it not true that more happiness lay in winning the way out
of deprivation, than in inventing safeguards against satiety? The
poor man succeeding in making himself rich--at numerous stages of the
operation there might be made a moral snap-shot of the truly happy man.
But not after he had reached the top. Then disintegration began at once.
The contrast between what he supposed he could do, and what he finds it
possible to do, is too vast to be accepted with equanimity.

It must be said that after breakfast--a meal which he found in an
Italian restaurant of no great cleanliness or opulence of pretension,
and ate with an almost novel relish--Thorpe took somewhat less gloomy
views of his position. He still walked e