Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART II FLESH, SPIRIT AND THE VEILED GOD Mr. Randolph spent the day getting acquainted and proved himself a good mixer. By telling a few stories that had not yet sifted down from Club-land and by standing a few drinks he soon found himself made free of all the technical information he needed and some more that was so ultra-technical that it could beat the brains that invented the delicate mechanism of the taximeter. He also established part ownership in a comfortable room in a house very much on the wrong or west side of Broadway, in fact within smelling and almost spitting distance of the North River. While he was still in funds he bought himself a woolen khaki overcoat with one of those enormous collars which look like an inverted bucket when they are up and surpass in efficiency the traditional black mask so beloved by illustrators of the weekly press. He also had a speaking slot cut in the glass of the cab-window just behind his best ear and subsequently removed and lost the slide that had been fitted over it with considerable skill and trouble. During the next few nights he proceeded to have the time of his life; so much so that he was constantly overwhelmed with wonder at his stupidity in not having become a taxi-driver years before! It should be remembered that Mr. Randolph was of New York Yorky; he knew everybody casually, from Mr. Milyuns and his daughter, Eileen, down to the latest addition to the pitiful ranks of the midinette. More than that, so broad was his acquaintanceship that as a sporting gent he had once or twice been tipped off as to the where and when of a proposed gun-play. In addition to being by right of birth an integral part of all the social strata of Manhattan, he knew the surface of the island and of the adjacent commoner soil of the mai…