ereafter he searched the Society columns for accounts of the doings of
the Webb folk. Thence, by a natural deflection, he became generally
interested in the recreations of the great world: he acquired a habit,
much to his sister's delight, of buying the weekly chronicles of
Society, and all the Sunday issues of the important dailies.

At first the sparkle and splendor, the glamour and mystery of the world
of fashion dazzled and delighted him. It was to him what fairy tales of
prince and princess are to children. For even he, prosaic, phlegmatic,
with nerves of iron and brain of shallows, had in him that germ of the
picturesque which in some natures shoots to high and full-flowered
ideals, in others to lofty or restless ambitions, coupled with a true
love of art; and yet again develops a weed of tenacious root and coarse
enduring fibre which a clever maker of words has named snobbery.

Gradually within Andrew's slow mind grew a dull resentment against Fate
for having played him so sinister a trick as to give him the husk
without the kernel, a title without a story that any one would ever
care to read. Why, when one of those Webb babies was due,--the family
appeared to be a large one,--could not his little wandering ego have
found its way into that ugly but notable mansion on Fifth Avenue instead
of having been spitefully guided to a New Jersey farm? Not that Andrew
expressed himself in this wise. Had he put his thoughts into words, he
would probably have queried in good terse English: "Why in thunder can't
I be Schuyler Churchill Webb instead of a nobody in Harlem? He's just my
age, and I might as well have been he as not."

His twenty-third birthday cake, prepared by loving hands, had scarcely
been eaten when the waves of snobbery first lapped his feet. At
twenty-five they had broken high above his head, and the surge was ever
in his ears. He was not acutely miserable: his health was too perfect,
his appetite too good. But deeper and deeper each week did he bury his
perplexed head in the social folk-lore of New York and Newport. Oftener
and oftener during the city season did he promenade central Fifth Avenue
from half-past four until half-past five in the afternoon of pleasant
days. He lived for the hour which would find him sauntering from
Forty-first Street to the Park and back again. He knew all the
fashionable men and women by sight. There was no one to tell him their
names, but the names themselves were more famil