The Fighting Chance

Three phenomena particularly characterised that metropolitan winter: the reckless rage for private gambling through the mediums of bridge and roulette; the incorporation of a company known as The Inter-County Electric Company, capitalised at a figure calculated to disturb nobody, and, so far, without any avowed specific policy other than that which served to decorate a portion of its charter which otherwise might have remained ornately and comparatively blank; the third phenomenon was the retirement from active affairs of Stanley S. Quarrier, the father of Howard Quarrier, and the election of the son to the presidency of the great Algonquin Loan and Trust Company, with its network system of dependent, subsidiary, and allied corporations.

The day that the newspapers gave this interesting information to the Western world, Leroy Mortimer, on being bluntly notified that he had overdrawn his account with the Algonquin Loan and Trust, began telephoning in every direction until he located Beverly Plank at the Saddle Club--an organisation of wealthy men, and sufficiently exclusive not to compromise Plank's possible chances for something better; in fact, the Saddle Club, into which Leroy Mortimer had already managed to pilot him, was one riser and tread upward on the stair he was climbing, though it was more of a lobby for other clubs than a club in itself. To be seen there was, perhaps, rather to a man's advantage, if he did not loaf there in the evenings or use it too frequently. As Plank carefully avoided doing either, Mortimer was fortunate in finding him there; and he crawled out of his hansom, saying that the desk clerk would pay, and entered the reading-room, where Plank sat writing a letter.

Beverly Plank had grown stouter since he had returned to town from Black Fells; but the increase of weight was evenly distributed over his six feet odd, which made him only a trifle more ponderous and not abdominally fat. But Mortimer had become enormous; rolls of flesh crowded his mottled ear-lobes outward and bulged above his collar; cushions of it padded the backs of his hands and fingers; shaving left his heavy, distended face congested and unpleasantly shiny. But he was as minutely groomed as ever, and he wore that satiated air of prosperity which had always been one of his most important assets.

The social campaign inaugurated by Leila Mortimer in behalf of Beverly Plank had, so far, received no serious reverses. His box at the horse show, of course, produced merely negative results; his box at the opera might mean something some day. His name was up at the Lenox and the Patroons; he had endowed a ward in the new pavilion of St. Berold's Hospital; he had presented a fine Gainsborough--The Countess of Wythe--to the Metropolitan Museum; and it was rumoured that he had consulted several bishops concerning a new chapel for that huge bastion of the citadel of Faith looming above the metropolitan wilderness in the north.