The Leopard's Spots by Fred M. White — Read

A contented little sigh trickled from Stagg's lips. He had a comfortable feeling that things were going his way, and with that sanguine nature of his he was beginning to see fat and rosy profits looming in the distance. And these would be legitimate profits, too, the result of certain hard work and mental ingenuity in which he shone. For Stagg was essentially the type of man who preferred to live honestly if he could. He was not blind to the dangers of the crooked path or to the fact that a man's soul becomes soiled by conflict with that sort of moral pitch that some men call business. He was eminently an aristocrat, both by birth and inclination, and if the sheer need of what he regarded as necessaries sometimes compelled him to the oblique, he regretted the necessity none the less.

Not that he was over scrupulous when the spur of need pressed deeply, nor was he blind to the humour of some of his expedients. But he was a man who loved his comforts, to say nothing of his little luxuries, and these had to be provided for. Otherwise, he often asked himself, what was the good of living at all? He wanted to be straight, and if fortune were with him at this juncture, then he would be able to follow the path of rectitude in future and all such pseudonyms as 'Frank Fair' and the like might be relegated to obscurity.