While everyone has heard of King Midas’s avarice and his desire for The Golden Touch that transforms everything he touches into gold, not everyone has heard of The Leaden Touch. In Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book one of the children who hears of the famous story about King Midas, remarks, “But some people have what we may call ‘The Leaden Touch,’ and make everything dull and heavy that they lay their fingers upon.”

In O. Henry’s short story “The Social Triangle,”  Ikey Snigglefritz, a simple tailor’s apprentice, receives his week’s wages and on his way home enters the Café Maginnis. There he accidentally ...