Three men sat in the Cosmic Club discussing the question: “What’sthe matter with Jones?” Waldemar, the oldest of the conferees, was theowner, and at times the operator, of an important and decent newspaper. Hisheavy face wore the expression of good-humored power, characteristic of theexperienced and successful journalist. Beside him sat Robert Bertram, the clubidler, slender and languidly elegant. The third member of the conference wasJones himself.
Average Jones had come by his nickname inevitably. His parents had foredoomedhim to it when they furnished him with the initials A. V. R. E. as preface tohis birthright of J for Jones. His character apparently justified the chanceconcomitance. He was, so to speak, a composite photograph of any thousandwell-conditioned, clean-living Americans between the ages of twenty-five andthirty. Happily, his otherwise commonplace face was relieved by the oneunfailing characteristic of composite photographs, large, deep-set andthoughtful eyes. Otherwise he would have passed in any crowd, and nobody wouldhave noticed him pass. Now, at twenty-seven, he looked back over the five yearssince his graduation from college and wondered what he had done with them; andat the four previous years of undergraduate life and wondered how he had doneso well with those and why he had not in some manner justified the partingwords of his favorite professor.
“You have one rare faculty, Jones. You can, when you choose, sharpen thepencil of your mind to a very fine point. Specialize, my boy,specialize.”
If the recipient of this admonition had specialized in anything, it was inlife. Having twenty-five thousand a year of his own he might have continued inthat path indefinitely, but for two influences. One was an irruptive cravingwithin him to take some part in the dynamic activities of the surroundingworld. The other was the “freak” will of his late andlittle-lamented uncle, from whom he had his present income, and his futureexpectations of some ten millions. Adrian Van Reypen Egerton had, as Waldemaronce put it, “—one into the mayor’s chair with a good nameand come out with a block of ice stock.” In a will whose cynical humorwas the topic of its day, Mr. Egerton jeered posthumously at the public whichhe had despoiled, and promised restitution, of a sort, through his heir.
“Therefore,” he had written, “I give and bequeath to the saidAdrian Van Reypen Egerton Jones, the residue of my property, the principal tobe taken over by him at such time as he shall have completed five years ofcontinuous residence in New York City. After s