For one hour Andrew sat there, and at its end he comprehended why the
cottagers did not concern themselves about the tickets sold. Not one
icy glance had been directed at the treble row of seats, not one
inquiring stare bent upon the occasional tourist-couple who summoned
courage to take a whirl. He and his companions might have been invisible
intruders on a foreign planet, for all the notice the elect took of
them. There was nothing overt, nothing unkind, but the stranger was as
effectually frozen out as if he had fled before a battery of lorgnettes.
The cottagers were like one large family. There was no more reserve
among the young people than if they had been a party of happy
well-trained schoolchildren. What wonder that the stranger within their
gates felt his remoteness! During the "Lancers" they almost romped. They
might have been on the lawn of one of their own cottages, and these
outsiders hanging on the fence. To any and all without their world they
were unaffectedly oblivious.
At the end of the hour Andrew rose heavily and left his seat. His face
was gray, his knees shook a little. He understood.
* * * * *
But his cup of bitterness was not yet full. As he made his way down the
passage behind one of the rows of chairs reserved for the cottagers, he
beheld a girl who had just entered. He stood still and stared at her,
wondering that he had ever thought other women beautiful. If those he
had worshipped were princesses, this was a goddess. Only New York could
give her that nameless distinction, so curiously unlike the graceful
breeding of older lands,--the difference between the hothouse orchid and
the lily of ancient parks. This girl's figure was more Junoesque than
was usual with her kind, her waist larger. She was very tall. Her
carriage was one of regal simplicity, as if she were wont to walk on
stars. Her shining brown hair was gathered into a knot at the base of
her classic head. Her brow and chin and throat were perfect in their
modelling. Her skin, of a marvellous whiteness, seemed to shed a light
of its own; one might surely examine it with a microscope and find no
flaw. Her mouth and nose were irregular, but her large blue-gray eyes
shone triumphant, and she had beautiful ears. She wore a simple gown of
pale blue organdie, clinging to her faultless figure, even at the throat
and wrists. At her right was the new-found relative of the Webbs, half a
head too short to reach that exquisite ear with his mumblings. About her
were several other men.
Andrew's capacity for love may not have been very profound, but he loved
this woman at once and finally. It was a love that would have delighted
the cynical Schopenhauer and the philosophical Darwin. The instinct of
selection had never been more spontaneously and unerringly exercised. He
was conscious of neither passion nor sentiment, however. She hovered in
his visions as a companion at great functions--his possession whom all
the world would envy. It was not so much she he loved as what she
represented.
His attention was momentarily distracted by the remarkable antics of an
elderly man. This person was bowing and genuflecting before the goddess,
rolling his eyes upward, throwing out his hands, clasping and wringing
them--a pantomime of speechless admiration. To Andrew he looked like an
elderly billy-goat with a thorn in its hoof. The goddess looked down
upon him with an expression of good-natured contempt. The men applauded
heartily. Andrew once more riveted his gaze on the face which had
completed his undoing. In a moment the girl's clear eyes met his, then
moved past as indifferently as if she had gazed upon space. Andrew
turned, forgetting his hat, and almost ran from the house, down the
street, and up the stairs to his apartment. He flung himself into a
chair, buried his face in his hands, and groaned aloud. The hopelessness
of his case surged through his brain with pitiless reiteration. He
might as well attempt to fly to one of the cold stars above his casement
as to besiege the society of New York. There was literally no human
being out of earth's millions to give him the line that would pass him
through those open invincible portals. Had he been a baboon from Central
Africa, his chances would have been better; he would have compelled
their attention for a moment.
There were heavy _portières_ over his door; no one could hear his
groans, and he afforded himself that measure of relief. The tears ran
down his cheeks; he twisted his strong hands together. Those whose
hearts have been convulsed by the bitterness of love, by the loss of
children, by the downfall of great hopes, may read with scorn this
suffering of a snob. It may seem a mean and trivial emotion. But he has
had scant opportunity to study his kind who knows nothing of the power
of the snob to suffer. An artist may toil on unrecognized, yet with the
deep delight of his art as compensation. A man in public life may be
stung with a thousand bitter defeats, but he has the joy of the fight,
the self-respect of legitimate ambition. But for the repeated defeats of
even the successful snob, what compensation? Step by step he climbs, to
find another still to mount, each bristling with obstacles, to which he
yields the shreds and patches of his self-respect. The bitter knowledge
that he is on tolerance is ever with him--that no matter how high he
rises, he can never reach his goal, for at the goal are only those who
have never known the need to strive. 'Tis a constant battle for a
soap-bubble, an ambition without soul.
And Andrew? He had not even planted his foot on the first step. For five
years he had lived in a fool's paradise, a corroding dream. There was
literally nothing else on earth that he wanted. His money had come to
him as the very irony of Fate. It could not give him the one thing he
wished, and he had no other use for it. His dream was over. He felt like
an aged man set free from an asylum for the demented after a period of
incarceration which had devoured the good years of his life. He looked
at what still seemed wealth to him as such a man would look at all the
joys of light and liberty and taste, offered to his paralyzed senses.
When the sun rose it shone down with an air of personal sympathy upon
the fleet of white yachts in the bay, upon the grand old avenues, upon
the relics of an historic past no cottager ever thinks of, upon the
splendid houses of those who have made Newport's younger fame. And it
straggled through one pair of heavy curtains and gleamed upon the white
face of a young man who had joined the ranks of those that proclaim the
world their conqueror.