speak Italian far more fluently than he had English. A short time before I stumbled upon him at the Tevkins' he had built an enormous block of high, brick apartment-houses in Harlem. He had gone into the undertaking with only five thousand dollars of his own, and before the houses were half completed he had sold them all, pocketing an enormous profit. When we were peddlers together he had been considered a failure and a fool. He now struck me as a clever fellow, full of dash.

Nor did Volodsky represent the only metamorphosis of this kind that I came across. It was as though there were something in the atmosphere which turned paupers into capitalists and inane milksops into men of brains and pluck.

Volodsky succeeded in luring me into a network of speculations

Tevkin had an interest in some of these operations, and, as they were mostly concerned with property in Harlem or in the Bronx, his house became my real-estate headquarters. There were two classes of callers at his home now: the socialists and the literary men or artists who visited Tevkin's children and the "real-estate crowd" who came to see Tevkin himself. It came to be tacitly understood that the library was to be left to the former, while the dining-room, in the basement, was used as Tevkin's office. Being "a friend of the family," I had the freedom of both

"You're making a big mistake, Levinsky," Nodelman once said to me, with a gesture of deep concern. "What is biting you? Aren't you making money fast enough? Mark my word, if you try to swallow too fast you'll choke. Any doctor will tell you that."

I urged him to join me, but he would not hear of it. Instead, he exhorted me to sell out my holdings and give all my attention to my cloak business

"Take pity on your hard-earned pennies, Levinsky," he would say. "Else you'll wake up some day like the fellow who has dreamed he has found a treasure. He's holding on to the treasure tight, and when he opens his eyes he finds it's nothing but a handful of wind." "I'll tell you what, Levinsky," he began on one occasion. "You ought to see some of those magician fellows."

"What for?" I asked

"Did you ever see them at their game? They'll put an egg into a hat; say, 'One, two, three,' and pull out a chicken. And then they say, 'One, two, three,' again and there's neither a chicken nor an egg. That's the way all this real-estate racket will end. Mark my word, Levinsky."

Bender nagged and pleaded with me without let-up. If I had had the remotest doubt of his devotion to me it would have been dispelled now. I was at my great mahogany desk every morning, as usual, but I seldom stayed more than two hours, and even during those two hours my mind was divided between cloaks and real estate or between cloaks and Anna. Bender was practically in full charge of the business. Instead, however, of welcoming the power it gave him, he made unrelenting efforts to restore things to their former state. He was constantly haranguing me on the risks I was incurring, beseeching me to drop my new ventures, and threatening to leave me unless I did so. Once, as he was thus expostulating with me, he broke down

"I appeal to you as your friend, as your old-time teacher," he said, and burst into tears

If it had not been for him I should have neglected my cloak business beyond repair. He handled me as a gambler's wife does her husband. He would seek me out in front of some unfinished building, at Tevkin's, or at some "boom" café, and make me sign some checks, consult me on something or other, or wheedle me into accompanying him to my factory for an hour or two. But the next day he would have to go hunting for me again

I had invested considerable money in my new affairs, and releasing it at short notice would not have been an easy matter. But the great point was that I was literally intoxicated by my new interests, and the fact that they were intimately associated with the atmosphere of Anna's home had much--perhaps everything--to do with it

I loved her to insanity. She was the supreme desire of my being. I knew that she was weaker in character and mind than Elsie, for example, but that seemed to be a point in her favor rather than against her. "She is a good girl," I would muse, "mild, kindly, girlish. As for her 'radical' notions, they really don't matter much. I could easily knock them out of her. I should be happy with her. Oh, how happy!" And, in spite of the fact that I thought her weak, the sight of her would fill me with awe.

One's first love is said to be the most passionate love of which one is capable. I do not think it is. I think my feeling for Anna was stronger, deeper, more tender, and more overpowering than either of my previous two infatuations. But then, of course, there is no way of measuring and comparing things of this kind. Anna was the first virgin I had ever loved.

Was that responsible for the particular depth of my feeling? "Oh, I must have her or I'll fall to pieces," I would say to myself, yearning and groaning and whining like a lunatic

My gambling mania was really the aberration of a love-maddened brain. How could Bender or Nodelman understand it? I found myself in the midst of other lunatics, of men who had simply been knocked out of balance by the suddenness of their gains. My money had come slowly and through work and worry. Theirs had dropped from the sky. So they could scarcely believe their senses that it was not all a dream. They were hysterical with gleeful amazement; they were in a delirium of ecstasy over themselves; and at the same time they looked as though they were tempted to feel their own faces and hands to make sure that they were real

One evening I saw a man whose family was still living on fifteen dollars a week lose more than six hundred dollars in poker and then take a group of congenial spirits out for a spree that cost him a few hundred dollars more.

One man in this party, who was said to be worth three-quarters of a million, had only recently worked as a common brick-layer. He is fixed in my memory by his struggles to live up to his new position, more especially by the efforts he would make to break himself of certain habits of speech. He always seemed to be on his guard lest some coarse word or phrase should escape him, and when a foul expression eluded his vigilance he would give a start, as if he had broken something. There was often a wistful look in his eye, as if he wondered whether his wealth and new mode of living were not merely a cruel practical joke. Or was he yearning for the simpler and more natural life which he had led until two years ago? We had many an expensive meal together, and often, as he ate, he would say: "Oh, it's all nonsense, Mr. Levinsky. All this fussy stuff does not come up to one spoon of my wife's cabbage soup."

Once he said: "Do you really like champagne? I don't. You may say I am a common, ignorant fellow, but to me it doesn't come up to the bread cider mother used to make. Honest." And he gave a chuckle

I knew a man who bought a thousand-dollar fur coat and a full-dress suit before he had learned to use a handkerchief. He always had one in his pocket, but he would handle it gingerly, as if he had not the heart to soil it, and then he would carefully fold it again. The effect money had on this man was of quite another nature than it was in the case of the bricklayer.

It had made him boisterously arrogant, blusteringly disdainful of his intellectual superiors, and brazenly foul-mouthed. It was as though he was shouting: "I don't have to fear or respect anybody now! I have got a lot of money. I can do as I damn please." More than one pure man became dissolute in the riot of easily gotten wealth. A real-estate speculator once hinted to me, in a fit of drunken confidence, that his wife, hitherto a good woman and a simple home body, had gone astray through the new vistas of life that had suddenly been flung open to her. One fellow who was naturally truthful was rapidly becoming a liar through the practice of exaggerating his profits and expenditures. There was an abundance of side-splitting comedy in the things I saw about me, but there was no dearth of pathos, either. One day, as I entered a certain high-class restaurant on Broadway, I saw at one of the tables a man who looked strikingly familiar to me, but whom I was at first unable to locate. Presently I recognized him. Three or four years before he had peddled apples among the employees of my cloak-shop. He had then been literally in tatters. That was why I was now slow to connect his former image with his present surroundings. I had heard of his windfall. He had had a job as watchman at houses in process of construction. While there he had noticed things, overheard conversations, put two and two together, and finally made fifty thousand dollars in a few months as a real-estate broker

We were furtively eying each other. Finally our eyes met. He greeted me with a respectful nod and then his face broke into a good-humored smile. He moved over to my table and told me his story in detail. He spoke in brief, pithy sentences, revealing a remarkable understanding of the world. In conclusion he said, with a sigh: "But what is the good of it all? The Upper One has blessed me with one hand, but He has punished me with the other."

It appeared that his wife had died, in Austria, just when she was about to come to join him and he was preparing to surprise her with what, to her, would have been a palatial apartment

"For six years I tried to bring her over, but could not manage it," he said, simply. "I barely made enough to feed one mouth. When good luck came at last, she died. She was a good woman, but I never gave her a day's happiness. For eighteen years she shared my poverty. And now, that there is something better to share, she is gone."

CHAPTER VI ONE of the many Jewish immigrants who were drawn into the whirl of real-estate speculation was Max Margolis, Dora's husband. I had heard his name in connection with some deals, and one afternoon in February we found ourselves side by side in a crowd of other "boomers." The scene was the corner of Fifth Avenue and One Hundred and Sixteenth Street, two blocks from Tevkin's residence, a spot that usually swarmed with Yiddish-speaking real-estate speculators in those days. It was a gesticulating, jabbering, whispering, excited throng, resembling the crowd of curb-brokers on Broad Street. Hence the nickname