Men must swing around him as planets around the sun.
Moreover, since his fall from grace in Philadelphia he had come to think that never again, perhaps, could he hope to become socially acceptable in the sense in which the so-called best society of a city interprets the phrase; and pondering over this at odd moments, he realized that his future allies in all probability would not be among the rich and socially important--the clannish, snobbish elements of society--but among the beginners and financially strong men who had come or were coming up from the bottom, and who had no social hopes whatsoever.

There were many such.

If through luck and effort he became sufficiently powerful financially he might then hope to dictate to society.

Individualistic and even anarchistic in character, and without a shred of true democracy, yet temperamentally he was in sympathy with the mass more than he was with the class, and he understood the mass better.

Perhaps this, in a way, will explain his desire to connect himself with a personality so naive and strange as Peter Laughlin.