For that reason he had invited him to participate in the valuable Siowitha deal, supposing a man as comparatively poor as Selwyn would not only jump at the opportunity, but also prove sufficiently grateful later.

And he had been amazed and disgusted at Selwyn's attitude.

But he had not supposed the man would sever his connection with the firm if he, Neergard, went ahead on his own responsibility.

It astonished and irritated him; it meant, instead of selfish or snobbish indifference to his own social ambitions, an enemy to block his entrance into what he desired--the society of those made notorious in the columns of the daily press.
For Neergard cared only for the notorious in the social scheme; nothing else appealed to him.

He had, all his life, read with avidity of the extravagances, the ostentation, the luxurious effrontery, the thinly veiled viciousness of what he believed to be society, and he craved it from the first, working his thick hands to the bone in dogged determination to one day participate in and satiate himself with the easy morality of what he read about in his penny morning paper--in the days when even a penny was to be carefully considered.
That was what he wanted from society--the best to be had in vice.