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He saw that in the light Karospina was a much older man than he had at first supposed. But the broad shoulders, the thick chest, and short, powerful figure and bullet head belied his years. Incredulously his visitor asked himself if this were the wonderful, the celebrated Karospina, chemist, revolutionary, mystic, nobleman, and millionnaire.
The disappointment, the debt and despair, the pink teas and blue dinners given in cramped flats, the good fellows afraid to say no to wives whose hearts are set on being thought 'in it, and the wives, haggard and hollow-eyed because the husbands wish to keep the pace by joining clubs that are supposedly the hall-marks of the millionnaire.
No gloomy spirit could refuse to listen to its lullaby, and the spray baptized it with the subtile benediction of a cheerier mood. No rank held place there; for the democratic sea toppled down the greatest statesman in the land, and dashed over the bald pate of a millionnaire with the same white-crested wave that stranded a poor parson on the beach and filled a fierce reformer's mouth with brine.
"But it isn't praiseworthy to abandon the child. Why not trust it to Madame here, who would put it out to nurse, so that you would be able to take it back some day, when you have found work? It wouldn't cost much, and no doubt the father would pay." This time Norine flew into a passion. "He! pay? Ah! you don't know him. It's not that the money would inconvenience him, for he's a millionnaire.
Peculation and extortion in these high functions were offences, in theory, of the gravest kind; but the offender could only be tried before a limited number of his peers, and a governor who had plundered a subject state, sold justice, pillaged temples, and stolen all that he could lay hands on, was safe from punishment if he returned to Rome a millionnaire and would admit others to a share in his spoils.
In the month of June, thirty-seven years ago, I bought one of those pencil-cases from a boy whom I shall call Hawker, and who was in my form. Is he dead? Is he a millionnaire? Is he a bankrupt now? He was an immense screw at school, and I believe to this day that the value of the thing for which I owed and eventually paid three-and-sixpence, was in reality not one-and-nine.
"By all the blue devils that dance in my brain!" said the unhappy millionnaire, starting up on his bed of pain, as if he had a spring in his back, and throwing at the nose of his astonished apothecary, who was watching him, the draught presented to him, "by the wig of my respected grandfather, by the beard of Æsculapius, I have found the real friend who will pour over my head the oil of health."
It is the dark before the dawn of the War of the Rebellion. It was before these days of degenerated citizenship, when the rising tide of gold floats the corrupt millionnaire and syndicate's agent into the Senate. The senator's toga then wrapped the shoulders of our greatest men. No bonanza agents huge moral deformities of heaped-up gold were made senatorial hunchbacks by their accidental millions.
The gaping and staring idleness of the theatre was an abomination to the sober earnestness and the spirit of activity which animated the Roman of the olden type; and inasmuch as it was the deepest and noblest conception lying at the root of the Roman commonwealth, that within the circle of Roman burgesses there should be neither master nor slave, neither millionnaire nor beggar, but that above all a like faith and a like culture should characterize all Romans the school and the necessarily exclusive school-culture were far more dangerous still, and were in fact utterly destructive of the sense of equality.
I had no time for formalities. "Gimme a quarter to eat on," I blurted out. And as I live, that millionnaire dipped into his pocket and gave me ... just ... precisely ... a quarter. It is my conviction that he was so flabbergasted that he obeyed automatically, and it has been a matter of keen regret ever since, on my part, that I didn't ask him for a dollar. I know that I'd have got it.
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