exciting "lifts" to the top of twenty-three story
buildings and admiring the wonderful views such altitudes gave him. He
did not perhaps comprehend how much he was influenced by the friction
of two million wills and interests; did not realize how they evoked
an electric condition that got behind the foreground of existence and
stirred something more at the roots of his being than any previous
experience had ever done. And this feeling was especially entrancing
when he saw the great city and majestic river lying at his feet in the
white, uncanny light of electricity, all its color gone, its breath
cold, its life strangely remote and quiet, men moving like shadows,
and sounds hollow and faint and far off, as if they came from a distant
world. It gave him a sense of dreamland quite as much as that of
reality. The Yorkshire moors and words grew dull and dreary in his
memory; even the thought of the hunting field could not lure his desire.
New York was full of marvelous novelties; its daily routine, even in the
hotel and on the streets, gripped his heart and his imagination; and he
confessed to himself that New York was life at first hand; fresh drawn,
its very foam sparkling and intoxicating. He walked from the Park to the
Battery and examined all that caught his eye. He had a history of
the city and sought out every historical site; he even went over to
Weehawken, and did his best to locate the spot where Burr and Hamilton
fought. He admired Hamilton, but after reading all about the two men,
gave his sympathy to Burr, "a clever, unlucky little chap," he said.
"Why do clever men hate each other?" and then he smiled queerly as he
remembered political enemies of great men in his own day and his own
country; and concluded that "it was their nature to do so."

But in these outside enthusiasms he did not forget his personal
relations. It took him but a few days to domesticate himself in both the
Rawdon houses. When the weather drove him off the streets, he found a
pleasant refuge either with Madam or with Ethel and Miss Bayard. Ethel
he saw less frequently than he liked; she was nearly always with Dora
Denning, but with Ruth Bayard he contracted a very pleasant friendship.
He told her all his adventures and found her more sympathetic than Madam
ever pretended to be. Madam thought him provincial in his tastes, and
was better pleased to hear that he had a visiting entry at two good
clubs, and had hired a motor ear, and was learnin