“To tell you the truth, Aleck, I’m studying human nature, too. Just now I’m passing through an apprenticeship. I make it an object to spend as I go, and each night I throw away what I have made during the day.”
“If you’re the same old rolling stone I knew a year or two ago, that isn’t probably a very hard business,” smiles Aleck, for good-natured Claude was usually in a chronic state of financial collapse, yet he would cheerfully bestow his last nickel in charity.
“You’re quite correct; but there are times when it bothers me just what to do with certain sums.”
“Indeed! That is news. Glad to hear you have been so lucky. Thinking of starting any hospitals, sanitariums, orphan asylums?”
“They’ll all come to-morrow, if fortune is kind,” returns the man with the fez.
Craig steals a side look at him, as though wondering whether this is a joke or the other has gone mad.
“What has to-day done for you, then?” he asks, bent upon solving the mystery, whereupon Claude deliberately takes out a notebook, turns over the pages, and sighs:
“I made a poor investment, which cuts a big figure in the whole, so my profits for the day only amount to the pitiful sum of seventeen thousand, three hundred and eleven.”
“Dollars?” exclaims the astonished Aleck.
“Why, certainly,” nods the other; “and that is a wretched showing in comparison to some others I could pick out in here,” tapping the wonderful notebook affectionately.