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The murder of Monty Paliser, headlined that morning in the papers, shookthe metropolis at breakfast, buttered the toast, improved the taste ofthe coffee.
Murdered! It seemed too bad to be false. Moreover, there was hispicture, the portrait of a young man obviously high-bred and insolentlygood-looking. In addition to war news and the financial page, what morecould you decently ask for a penny? Nothing, perhaps, except the addressof the murderer. But that detail, which the morning papers omitted,extras shortly supplied. Meanwhile in the minds of imaginative NewYorkers, visions of the infernal feminine surged. The murdered man'sname was evocative.
His father, Montagu Paliser, generally known as M. P., had lived in thatextensive manner in which New York formerly took an indignant delight.Behind him, extending back to the remotest past when Bowling Green wasthe centre of fashion, always there had been a Paliser, precisely asthere has always been a Livingston. These people and a dozen othersformed the landed gentry—a gentry otherwise landed since. But not thePaliser clan. The original Paliser was very wealthy. All told he had athousand dollars. Montagu Paliser, the murdered man's father, had statedcasually, as though offering unimportant information, that, by Gad, sir,you can't live like a gentleman on less than a thousand dollars a day.That was years and years ago. Afterward he doubled his estimate.Subsequently, he quadrupled it. It made no hole in him either. In spiteof his yac