He came where he could watch his money breed more
money, and bring greater increase of its kind in an hour of luck than the
toil of hundreds of men could earn in a year. He called it speculation,
stocks, the Street; and his pride, his faith in himself, mounted with his
luck. He expected, when he had sated his greed, to begin to spend, and he
had formulated an intention to build a great house, to add another to the
palaces of the country-bred millionaires who have come to adorn the great
city. In the mean time he made little account of the things that occupied
his children, except to fret at the ungrateful indifference of his son to
the interests that could alone make a man of him. He did not know whether
his daughters were in society or not; with people coming and going in the
house he would have supposed they must be so, no matter who the people
were; in some vague way he felt that he had hired society in Mrs. Mandel,
at so much a year. He never met a superior himself except now and then a
man of twenty or thirty millions to his one or two, and then he felt his
soul creep within him, without a sense of social inferiority; it was a
question of financial inferiority; and though Dryfoos's soul bowed itself
and crawled, it was with a gambler's admiration of wonderful luck.
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