I like the way they live. I like the things they eat. The more we mix together the better I like the things we mix.

Especially I like the way they dress, their grey check trousers, their white check waistcoats, their heavy gold chains, and the signet-rings that they sign their cheques with. My! they look nice. Get six or seven of them sitting together in the club and it’s a treat to see them. And if they get the least dust on them, men come and brush it off. Yes, and are glad to. I’d like to take some of the dust off them myself.

Even more than what they eat I like their intellectual grasp. It is wonderful. Just watch them read. They simply read all the time. Go into the club at any hour and you’ll see three or four of them at it. And the things they can read! You’d think that a man who’s been driving hard in the office from eleven o’clock until three, with only an hour and a half for lunch, would be too fagged. Not a bit. These men can sit down after office hours and read the Sketch and the Police Gazette and the Pink Un, and understand the jokes just as well as I can.

What I love to do is to walk up and down among them and catch the little scraps of conversation. The other day I heard one lean forward and say, “Well, I offered him a million and a half and said I wouldn’t give a cent more, he could either take it or leave it–” I just longed to break in and say, “What! what! a million and a half! Oh! say that again! Offer it to me, to either take it or leave it. Do try me once: I know I can: or here, make it a plain million and let’s call it done.”

Not that these men are careless over money. No, sir. Don’t think it. Of course they don’t take much account of big money, a hundred thousand dollars at a shot or anything of that sort. But little money. You’ve no idea till you know them how anxious they get about a cent, or half a cent, or less.

Why, two of them came into the club the other night just frantic with delight: they said wheat had risen and they’d cleaned up four cents each in less than half an hour. They bought a dinner for sixteen on the strength of it. I don’t understand it. I’ve often made twice as much as that writing for the papers and never felt like boasting about it.

One night I heard one man say, “Well, let’s call up New York and offer them a quarter of a cent.” Great heavens! Imagine paying the cost of calling up New York, nearly five million people, late at night and offering them a quarter of a cent! And yet–did New York get mad? No, they took it. Of course, it’s high finance. I don’t pretend to understand it. I tried after that to call up Chicago and offer it a cent and a half, and to call up Hamilton, Ontario, and offer it half a dollar, and the operator only thought I was crazy.

All this shows, of course, that I’ve been studying how the millionaires do it. I have. For years.