he had endured it—the sordid life in the five-dollar boarding-house, the lunch of tough sandwiches of Texas beef which had bulged his pockets on the way to his duties in the big dry goods store, the insolence of his Irish-American and German fellow-workers because of his English speech. And the haughty salesladies who had drawn their skirts from him as they squeezed past the tame detective at the timekeeper’s box—sitting there in the dark muniment room, even his present trouble could not check a smile at thinking what those damsels would have done if told that he had been about to become a duke within the month.
Yes, it had been a dirty trick that he had undertaken to escape all this, but somehow the thing had not seemed so bad when he was unacquainted with the persons interested. Just as old-time smugglers persuaded themselves that there was no dishonesty in defrauding the state, so in the same light he had regarded the spoliation of a big corporation like the Bank of England or the United States Treasury, whichever would have been the ultimate loser when the lawyers had settled the matter. He would never have gone into the business, even in his despairing exile, if he had
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