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 it did in any uptown drawing-room. Cigars were plentiful and a profusion of varieties of expensive cigarettes inhabited boxes on every desk. Paul particularly enjoyed the interminably prolonged luncheons at the Moloch Club, quartered in luxuriously furnished rooms directly under the roof of one of the tallest sky-scrapers where, after devouring a female lobster, one might sit about for an idle hour, with Vanity Fair in one's lap, bending a careless ear to the fellow sitting next to you on the deep, comfortable couch, upholstered in brown leather, and discovering, quite casually, all the details surrounding the latest spouse-breach.

It was not so much, Paul was beginning, justifiably, to believe, to support extravagant wives that men toiled in the city, as was the opinion generally expressed, especially by foreign visitors, as it was to escape from these wives. All his life Paul had listened to business men, in the cloak-rooms at evening parties, or before the sideboard, cocktail glass in hand, or at table, after dinner, bemoan their desperate lot, threatening to retire as soon as they had succeeded in amassing a sufficiently substantial roll. Reflection engendered by his recent personal experience reminded him that he had never known one of these men to carry out this blustering plan. Nevertheless, they continued to reiterate this story to the effect that they were jumping like hell for the dollar today, but that tomorrow they proposed to quit so that they might spend the remainder of