their days chasing pleasure around Europe with the Mrs.
This routine, but unpractised, philosophy, Paul soon discovered, was reserved exclusively for uptown dispensation. Observation of these fellows in their proper milieu gave him an entirely new impression of them which, quite reasonably, he conceived to be the true picture. They were having, he was by way of informing himself, an extraordinarily good time. To be sure, they dashed nimbly after the dollar, but even that part of the game resembled gambling or fox-hunting. It was an adventure replete with thrills, false trails, happy discoveries, comic coincidences. There was so much, indeed, of sportsman's luck in everything that went on there that Wall Street was prone to impress him as a kind of glorified Monte Carlo, the Circassian walnut cabinets in each office, stored with liquors and tobacco, supplying the place of the bar, while the Stock Exchange made an excellent substitute for the salle de jeu.
His spirits, accordingly, had risen appreciably, and he even found it possible to enjoy a dinner at home alone with Vera, when it was his present custom to refer portentously, after the best manner of his confreres, to his hard day in the city, and to brag of the transaction he had contrived to carry through by resorting to a vast amount of bluff, while his wife sat by, humbly esteeming this industrial brilliancy on the part of her Viking-like husband.
