Montague had observed with perplexity that such incendiary talk as this was one of the characteristics of people in these lofty altitudes. It was one of the liberties accorded to their station. Editors and bishops and statesmen and all the rest of their retainers had to believe in the respectabilities, even in the privacy of their clubs - the people's ears were getting terribly sharp these days! But among the real giants of business you might have thought yourself in a society of revolutionists; they would tear up the mountain tops and hurl them at each other. When one of these old war-horses once got started, he would tell tales of deviltry to appall the soul of the hardiest muck-rake man. It was always the other fellow, of course; but then, if you pinned your man down, and if he thought that he could trust you - he would acknowledge that he had sometimes fought the enemy with the enemy's own weapons!

But of course one must understand that all this radicalism was for conversational purposes only. The Major, for instance, never had the slightest idea of doing anything about all the evils of which he told; when it came to action, he proposed to do just what he had done all his life - to sit tight on his own little pile. And the Millionaires' was an excellent place to learn to do it!

"See that old money-bags over there in the corner," said the Major. "He's a man you want to fix in your mind - old Henry S. Grimes. Have you heard of him?"

"Vaguely," said the other.

"He's Laura Hegan's uncle. She'll have his money also some day - but Lord, how he does hold on to it meantime! It's quite tragic, if you come to know him - he's frightened at his own shadow. He goes in for slum tenements, and I guess he evicts more people in a month than you could crowd into this building!"

Montague looked at the solitary figure at the table, a man with a wizened-up little face like a weasel's, and a big napkin tied around his neck. "That's so as to save his shirt-front for to-morrow," the Major explained. "He's really only about sixty, but you'd think he was eighty. Three times every day he sits here and eats a bowl of graham crackers and milk, and then goes out and sits rigid in an arm-chair for an hour. That's the regimen his doctors have put him on - angels and ministers of grace defend us!"