At this juncture and just when she was bored and dispirited by the process, Gregory Williams appeared on the scene. Flossy met him at a dancing party. He had a very tall collar, a very friendly, confident, and (toward her) devoted manner, and good looks. It was whispered among the girls that he was a banker from New York. He was obviously not over thirty, which was young for a banker, but so he presently described himself to Flossy with hints of impending prosperity. He spoke glibly and picturesquely. He had a convincing eloquence of gesture--a wave of the hand which suggested energy and compelled confidence. He had picked her out at once to be introduced to, and sympathy between them was speedily established. Her wearing, as a red-headed girl, a white horse in the form of a pin, in order to prevent the attention of the men to whom she talked from wandering, delighted him. He said to himself that here was a girl after his own heart. He had admired her looks at the outset, but he gazed at her now more critically. He danced every dance with her, and they sat together at supper, apart from everybody else. Flossy's resolutions were swept away. That is, she had become in an instant indifferent to the fact that the New York girl she had yearned to imitate would not have made herself so conspicuous. Her excuse was that she could not help herself. It was a case of genuine, violent attraction, which she made no effort to straggle against.
The attraction was violent on both sides. Gregory Williams was not seeking to be married. He had been, until within six months, a broker's clerk, and had become a banker on the strength of ten thousand dollars bequeathed to him by a grandmother. He and a clerk from another broker's office, J. Willett VanHorne, had recently formed a partnership as Williams & VanHorne, Bankers and Dealers in Stocks and Bonds. He was not seeking to be married, but he intended to be married some day, and it was no part of his scheme of life to deny himself anything he wished. Support a wife? Of course he could; and support her in the same grandiose fashion which he had adopted for himself since he had begun business on his own account. He had chosen as a philosophy of life the smart paradox, which he enjoyed uttering, that he spent what he needed first and supplied the means later; and at the same time he let it be understood that the system worked wonderfully. He possessed unlimited confidence in himself, and though he was dimly aware that a very small turn of the wheel of fortune in the wrong direction would ruin him financially, he chose to close his eyes to the possibilities of disaster and to assume a bold and important bearing before the world. He had implicit faith in his own special line of ability, and he appreciated the worth of his partner, VanHorne. He had joined forces with VanHorne because he knew that he was the opposite of himself--that he was a delving, thorough, shrewd, keen office man--and able too. How genuinely able Williams did not yet know. He himself was to be the showy partner, the originator of schemes and procurer of business, the brilliant man before the world. So there was some method in his madness. And with it all went a cheery, incisive, humorous point of view which was congenial and diverting to Flossy.