However that may be, Charles returned to New York in excellent
trim; and, dreading in that great city the wiles of his antagonist,
he cheerfully accepted the invitation of his brother millionaire,
Senator Wrengold of Nevada, to spend a few days before sailing in
the Senator's magnificent and newly-finished palace at the upper
end of Fifth Avenue.
"There, at least, I shall be safe, Sey," he said to me plaintively,
with a weary smile. "Wrengold, at any rate, won't try to take me
in--except, of course, in the regular way of business."
Boss-Nugget Hall (as it is popularly christened) is perhaps the
handsomest brown stone mansion in the Richardsonian style on all
Fifth Avenue. We spent a delightful week there. The lines had fallen
to us in pleasant places. On the night we arrived Wrengold gave
a small bachelor party in our honour. He knew Sir Charles was
travelling without Lady Vandrift, and rightly judged he would prefer
on his first night an informal party, with cards and cigars, instead
of being bothered with the charming, but still somewhat hampering
addition of female society.
The guests that evening were no more than seven, all told, ourselves
included--making up, Wrengold said, that perfect number, an octave.
He was a nouveau riche himself--the newest of the new--commonly
known in exclusive old-fashioned New York society as the Gilded
Squatter; for he "struck his reef" no more than ten years ago; and
he was therefore doubly anxious, after the American style, to be
"just dizzy with culture.
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