He divined a bitter campaign against Hathorn. And he then dreamed a strange, sweet, wicked dream. Alida Hathorn’s stolen visits—with Justine, perhaps—as a dark-eyed devil laughing over the downfall of his enemy’s wife.
“I will make my own little game,” he laughed.
CHAPTER VII.
“PLUNGER” VREELAND’S GAY LIFE, “UNDER THE ROSE.”
Before the February snows were congealed into those dirty flakes of ice and street mud which are an evidence of the “effectiveness” of New York’s Street Cleaning department, the “top floor” of the Elmleaf bachelor apartment was considered to set the pace for the gayest of the bachelor apartments of Gotham. The hidden programme was even literally carried out.
Outwardly, the daily life of that fortunate individual, Mr. Harold Vreeland, had undergone little change. Once a day he duly occupied his desk at the downtown office, using alternately the morning and afternoon fraction.
He proved a very “tough nut to crack” for the local gossips, however. There was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde flavor of mystery clinging to the audacious young “Westerner.” The slow trots of the “Locust” and the old senile wiseacres of the “Sentinel” clubs wondered at his calm demeanor, his easily acquired repose of the caste of “Vere de Vere.” Vreeland was posing now as a “fixed star.”
Not even Bradstreet, or Dun, could seize upon any public delinquencies to the detriment of his “business character,” and yet, Harold Vreeland had rapidly acquired the reputation of a “devil of a fellow.” He had, like Byron, his “hours of idleness.”
There was, too, an outward prosperous harmony in the busy office of Wyman and Vreeland, now packed with clerks and forging to the front as a house of unexampled strength.
There was a sober, quiet effectiveness in the firm, which shamed the nervous “bucket shop” decadents, who were only noisy, screaming gulls, clamoring over the financial sea for “any old thing” in the way of floating pabulum.