h hapless
figures have been somehow invested by historians with a melancholy
glamour; and yet this appears to be true only of those royal
individuals who came by their thrones in the easiest way--that of
inheritance. The kings of high endeavor who have won to the pinnacle
by force of their own stoutness of heart--in other words the popular
idols of a fickle public, who have scarce begun to get acquainted with
the dizzy uncertainty of their pedestals before the pedestal be rudely
removed from beneath them--rarely find the world inclined to melancholy
interest in their plight. Ridicule is the commonest manifestation of
any interest whatsoever, ridicule and an unfathomable contempt.

For some time Perry Blair had been finding this hard to understand.
The adulation had been so overwhelming at first, so whole-hearted and
seeming sincere one brief year before. Why, even six months back he
could not have stood there thus, a tenth as long, before the copper
name-shield of the Claridge, without collecting about him a fawning,
favor-hunting throng so dense, so tenacious, and troublesome to traffic
that it would have brought the officer from his place beside the
surface-car tracks, caustic-tongued, to investigate and disperse it.
Nor would that officer have ordered them to move on, six months before,
once he had discovered what monarch it was who held informal court
there. He would have paused for a bluff joke or two himself, a knowing
word of importance, before returning to loose his indignation upon some
luckless wight of a family man, self-conscious and clumsy in what is
known as a tin lizzie.

They had hailed him so noisily, so elatedly, press and public alike.
That the latter had fawned and flattered should have warned him what to
expect, later on, but it did not. The greater wonder is that it did
not go to his head a little. It seemed it couldn't help but do that.

It had been so sudden. Mediocrity one day, and obscurity.
Mediocrity--and then world's champion, and the fierce white light which
beats upon a throne! Of course there had been some to sneer. Here and
there one had arisen to point out that Fanchette, the man whom he had
whipped in one round, had been but a shell of a man, champion in name
only, for a long, long time. They said the victory proved nothing.
They said that Perry Blair had just been lucky, that was all; lucky in
being selected as the one least calculated to damage Fanchette after a
whole ye