"Am suited perfectly—all the rooms I want."
"What is the number of your room?"
"A No. 1—first-class, sir. First-class hotel has first-class rooms, you see, sir. This is a first-class hotel—the ergo as to the rooms is conclusive."
"You are evasive."
"Only logical, sir!"
"You took dinner just now up stairs?"
"Ask your pardon. I took no dinner up stairs. I went up with an empty stomach. An excruciating stomachical void. 'Nature abhors a vacuum,' says philosophy; and, to borrow the apothegmatic utterance of that philosopher, Dan Brown, 'Dat's what's de matter.'"
"I must be plain, I see. You are Jack Vinton, and are up to your old tricks. You have come here, eaten a tip-top dinner, and were coolly walking away, with no thought of paying for it."
Jack saw he was in for it. He offered to pay for his dinner, and attempted by bribery to effect what he had hoped to effect by colossal cheekiness of action and tongue; but his antecedental history was self-crushing, like the mad ambition of the great Cæsar. He was conveyed to the Second District Police Court, and committed to answer this and other graver offences of swindling, of which he is supposed to be guilty.
Jack is only twenty-three years old, and is a master-swindler. Of good family, he has been well educated, and to fine looks adds the manners of a polished gentleman; while in artistic culture and familiarity with the classics, scientific studies and polite and poetical literature, he has few equals of his years. His dashing form is often seen on Broadway—the envied of his own sex and the admired of the opposite sex. His career betrays a wonderful and perverse mingling of the finest intellectual endowments and culture with the meanest and most pitiable traits of low and dishonest natures. He is a sort of Lord Bacon, on a vastly reduced scale of brilliancy. As philosophy delves the mysterious problem, she finds only "darkness to shadow round about it."