"That's the one."
Dineen lit a cigar and, drawing it into vaporous action, ruminated with enormous thumbs joined.
"It's good stock," he said, finally; "none better betwixt the Bowling Green and Patroon Van Courtlandt's old shebang. There's money, too; and an opera box and a bit of a shack at Newport. What kind of a lad is it?"
"He can look me in the face," said Rivett. "Otherwise he looks like everybody else of his sort, and probably resembles them, too. Ah!"—he broke out angrily—"these sleek-headed, tailor-made, smooth-faced young pups from New York, with their pleasant manners when they want anything, and their ways and means and by-ways and ten-cent brains—God! Dineen, do they really ever turn into men? Answer me that! You've lived long enough to see a new-born snob grow to be thirty. Do they ever turn into anything except the harmless fools they're born?"
Dineen slowly revolved his thumbs and squinted at a sunbeam, while the smoke from the cigar in his cheek rose to the ceiling in a straight, thin column.
"Dineen slowly revolved his thumbs and squinted at a sunbeam."
"Some of them become men," he said deliberately. "The most o' them is born spots and rots; or, if they're not, college addles 'em. But, God be praised! if it wasn't for them the good people of Reno, Palm Beach, and Paris, France, would starve entirely.... Jacob, they say there's a use even for the San José scale; and cursing would become a lost art barring the mosquito."
"What do you know about young Inwood?" asked Rivett.
"Nothing; he's a broker."