I looked at him with a renewed interest. Every one knew who Old Man Singleton was, and many persons liked to guess how much he was worth. Ostensibly he had retired, leaving to his two sons the management of the Singleton banking business, with its many ramifications; but actually he kept his interest in the concern and was reputed to be coaching his grandsons in the ways of the world, and especially that part of the world known as “The Street.”
Starting out as a New England villager who hated poverty because his family had always known it, he had come to New York as a lad of twenty, with red knitted mittens on his osseous hands, and he had at once removed the mittens and put the hands to work gathering money; it was rumored that the hands had never turned loose any of the garnered coin; it was even said by some persons that he still had the same pair of mittens.
The details of his rise I cannot give; he had achieved his ambition to be one of the very rich men of America because the ambition was so strong within him.
“Of course his fad is money,” I muttered to Ed the waiter. “Everybody knows that Old Man Singleton's fad is money.”
Ed was about to reply, when Mr. Singleton looked up and motioned for his check. Ed brought it, and gave the old gentleman his hat and his stick and his change.
“I hope everything was all right,” Mr. Singleton said Ed, palpably bidding for recognition and a tip.
“Eh? said Singleton, looking blankly at Ed You know me, hey? I don't recall you. Yes, everything was all right, thank you.” He gave the waiter a dime and passed out, after another blank, fumbling look at Ed, and a shake of his head. There was something feeble and wandering in the old fellow's manner; his memory was going; it was obvious that before long the rest of him would follow his memory. He shouldn't be allowed to go around this way alone at night,” murmured Ed, watching the door through which he had made his exit. “But I suppose he's as bull-headed as ever about doing what he pleases, even if his legs are shaky.”
“He didn't know you,” I hinted, for I wished to learn all that Ed knew about Old Man Singleton.
Ed is a person who has been in the world nearly fifty years; he has had some very unusual acquaintances and experiences. It is never safe to predict just what Ed will know and what he will not know. One afternoon, after I had known Ed for about a year, I was attempting to argue some scientific point with a friend who was lunching with me, and Ed, who was waiting on us and listening, remarked: “I beg your pardon, sir, but it wasn't in The Descent of Man that Darwin said that; it was in The Origin of Species.”
And yet, if you deduce from that remark that Ed knows a great deal about modern science, you will be mistaken; as likely as not he could quote pages of Marcus Aurelius to you, and at the same time he might pronounce “Euripides” as if the last two syllables were one, riming with “hides”; his reading, like his life, has been elective.