He sat there, the ferret-eyed young millionaire, glowering after Hathorn’s retreating form. “Pity to see Alida VanSittart wasted on that cold human calculating machine! Fred is as indurated as a steel chisel.”
The little child of Pactolus felt his tiny veins still tingling with the exhalant magnetism of the budding heiress whom Hathorn had selected as a second spoke in that wheel of fortune of which the unconscious Jimmy was the main stay.
The aforesaid young patrician, Miss Alida, was “divinely tall” and of a ravishing moonlight beauty, two elements of ensnaring witchery to the dapper, blasé
young Midas, whose little patent leathers had pattered vainly along after the stride of that elastic young goddess.
The alert Vreeland grimly eyed the eager Jimmy Potter, and noted the tell-tale quiver of the youth’s slim fingers as he fished out the two “star” leaders of his evening mail.
“I would like just one night with that chap at poker, with no limit,” gravely mused Vreeland, with an inspirational sigh. “He looks soft.”
While the parvenu “sized up” his man, he was aware of a hum of murmured comment at a table near him.
Two men were following with their envious eyes the tall form of the fortunate Hathorn—“the very rose and expectancy of the state,” as he called his myrmidons around him.
“Lucky devil is Hathorn,” quoth A. “Saw him get out of the train to-night with Mrs. Wharton Willoughby. Potter over there and a gang of girls have been up at Lakemere. He still holds her fast.”
Quoth B: “He has a regular run of nigger luck. Elaine Willoughby is the Queen of the Street. Her account must be worth a cool hundred thousand a year to the firm. And here drops in to him, the whole VanSittart fortune, a cool ten millions.”