of senators and congressmen and ex-governors, state treasurers,
collectors of the port, mill owners, and bankers to whom he referred, as
the French say, in terms of their "little" names. He dwelt on the
magnificence of the huge hotel set on the borders of a lake like an
inland sea, and related such portions of the festivities incidental to
"the seeing of Chicago" as would bear repetition. No women belonged to
this realm; no women, at least, who were to be regarded as persons.
Ditmar did not mention them, but no doubt they existed, along with the
cigars and the White Seal champagne, contributing to the amenities. And
the excursion, to Janet, took on the complexion of a sort of glorified
picnic in the course of which, incidentally, a President of the United
States had been chosen. In her innocence she had believed the voters to
perform this function. Ditmar laughed.
"Do you suppose we're going to let the mob run this country?" he
inquired. "Once in a while we can't get away with it as we'd like, we
have to take the best we can."
Thus was brought home to her more and more clearly that what men strove
and fought for were the joys of prominence, privilege, and power.
Everywhere, in the great world, they demanded and received consideration.
It was Ditmar's boast that if nobody else could get a room in a crowded
New York hotel, he could always obtain one. And she was fain to concede
--she who had never known privilege--a certain intoxicating quality to
this eminence. If you could get the power, and refused to take it, the
more fool you! A topsy-turvy world, in which the stupid toiled day by
day, week by week, exhausting their energies and craving joy, while
others adroitly carried off the prize; and virtue had apparently as
little to do with the matter as fair hair or a club foot. If Janet had
ever read Darwin, she would have recognized in her lover a creature
rather wonderfully adapted to his environment; and what puzzled her,
perhaps, was the riddle that presents itself to many better informed than
herself--the utter absence in this environment of the sign of any being
who might be called God. Her perplexities--for she did have them--took
the form of an instinctive sense of inadequacy, of persistently recurring
though inarticulate convictions of the existence of elements not included
in Ditmar's categories--of things that money could not buy; of things,
too, alas! that poverty was as powerless to grasp. Stored within her,
|