Chase never counted on probabilities; he took what came and was satisfied.
After leaving college, he drifted pretty much over the world, taking pot luck with fortune and clasping the hand of circumstance, to be led into the highways and byways, through good times and ill times, in love and out, always coming safely into port with a smiling wind behind.

There had been hard roads to travel as well as easy ones, but he never complained; he swung on through life with the heart of a soldier and the confidence of a Pagan.

He loathed business and he abhorred trade.
"That little old trust fund is making more money for me by lying idle than I could accumulate in a century by hard work as a grocer or an undertaker," he was prone to philosophise when his uncles, who were merchants, urged him to settle down and "do something." Not that there were grocers or undertakers among them; it was his way of impressing his sense of freedom upon them.
He was an orphan and bounden to no man.

No one had the right to question his actions after his twenty-first anniversary.

It was fortunate for him that he was a level-headed as well as a wild-hearted chap, else he might have sunk to the perdition his worthy uncles prescribed for him.