His innate refinement and good taste prevented any such uses of his spare time.
His weakness--for it could hardly be called a vice--was narrowed down to one infirmity, and one only: this was his inability to be happy without the exclusive society of some one woman.
Who the woman might be depended very largely on whom he might be thrown with.

In the first ten years of his majority--his days of poverty when a student--it had been some girl in exile, like himself.

During the last ten years--since his father's death and his inheritance--it had been a loose end picked out of the great floating drift--that social flotsam and jetsam which eddies in and out of the casinos of Nice and Monte Carlo, flows into Aix and Trouville in summer and back again to Rome and Cairo in winter--a discontented wife perhaps; or an unmarried woman of thirty-five or forty, with means enough to live where she pleased; or it might be some self-exiled Russian countess or English-woman of quality who had a month off, and who meant to make the most of it.

All most respectable people, of course, without a breath of scandal attaching to their names--Max was too careful for that--and yet each and every one on the lookout for precisely the type of man that Max represented: one never happy or even contented when outside the radius of a waving fan or away from the flutter of a silken skirt.
It was in one of these resorts of the idle, a couple of years before, while Lucy's husband and little Ellen were home in Geneva, that Max had met her, and where he had renewed the acquaintance of their childhood--an acquaintance which soon ripened into the closest friendship.
Hence his London drag and appointments; hence the yacht and a four-in-hand--then a great novelty--all of which he had promised her should she decide to join him at home.

Hence, too, his luxuriously fitted-up bachelor quarters in Philadelphia, and his own comfortable apartments in his late father's house, where his sister Sue lived; and hence, too, his cosey rooms in the best corner of the Beach Haven hotel, with a view overlooking Barnegat Light and the sea.
None of these things indicated in the smallest degree that this noble gentleman contemplated finally settling down in a mansion commensurate with his large means, where he and the pretty widow could enjoy their married life together; nothing was further from his mind--nothing could be--he loved his freedom too much.