He had never known Stacy's real motive for that act,--both Demorest and Stacy had kept their knowledge of the attempted robbery from their younger partner,--it always seemed to him to be a precious revelation of Stacy's inner nature.

Facing the wind and rain, he recalled how Stacy, though never so enthusiastic about his marriage as Demorest, had taken up Van Loo sharply for some foolish sneer about his own youthfulness.

He was affectionately tolerant of even Stacy's dislike to his wife's relations, for Stacy did not know them as he did.

Indeed, Barker, whose own father and mother had died in his infancy, had accepted his wife's relations with a loving trust and confidence that was supreme, from the fact that he had never known any other.
At last he reached his hotel.

It was a new one, the latest creation of a feverish progress in hotel-building which had covered five years and as many squares with large showy erections, utterly beyond the needs of the community, yet each superior in size and adornment to its predecessor.
It struck him as being the one evidence of an abiding faith in the future of the metropolis that he had seen in nothing else.