soured,       "what's there in that? It's mighty easy to do the philanthropist act when you're next door to a millionaire."     

       "Yes," said Mifflin warmly, "but it's not so easy when you're getting thirty dollars a week on a newspaper. When Jimmy was a reporter on the News, there used to be a whole crowd of fellows just living on him. Not borrowing an occasional dollar, mind you, but living on him—sleeping on his sofa, and staying to breakfast. It made me mad. I used to ask him why he stood for it. He said there was nowhere else for them to go, and he thought he could see them through all right—which he did, though I don't see how he managed it on thirty a week."     

       "If a man's fool enough to be an easy mark—" began Willett.     

       "Oh, cut it out!" said Raikes. "We don't want anybody knocking Jimmy here."     

       "All the same," said Sutton, "it seems to me that it was mighty lucky that he came into that money. You can't keep open house for ever on thirty a week. By the way, Arthur, how was that? I heard it was his uncle."     

       "It wasn't his uncle," said Mifflin. "It was by way of being a romance of sorts, I believe. Fellow who had been in love with Jimmy's mother years ago went West, made a pile, and left it to Mrs. Pitt or her children. She had been dead some time when that happened. Jimmy, of course, hadn't a notion of what was coming to him, when suddenly he got a solicitor's letter asking him to call. He rolled round, and found that there was about five hundred thousand dollars just waiting for him to spend it."     

       Jimmy Pitt had now definitely ousted "Love, the Cracksman" as a topic of conversation. Everybody present knew him. Most of them had known him in his newspaper days; and, though every man there would have perished rather than admit it, they were grateful to Jimmy for being exactly the same to them now that he could sign a check for half a million as he had been on the old thirty-a-week basis. Inherited wealth, of course, does not make a young man nobler or more admirable; but the young man does not always know this.     

       "Jimmy's had a queer life," said Mifflin. "He's been pretty much everything in his time. Did you know he was on the stage before he took up newspaper-work? Only on the road, I 

 Prev. P 3/207 next