s. She
was nearing thirty, and in spite of her beauty and the rarer distinction
that can best be described as breeding, she had never married. Men
admired her, but from a distance; she kept them at arm's length, they
said: strangers who visited the city invariably picked her out of an
assembly and asked who she was; one man from New York who came to visit
Ralph and who had been madly in love with her, she had amazed many people
by refusing, spurning all he might have given her. This incident seemed a
refutation of the charge that she was calculating. As might have been
foretold, she had the social gift in a remarkable degree, and in spite of
the limitations of her purse the knack of dressing better than other
women, though at that time the organization of our social life still
remained comparatively simple, the custom of luxurious and expensive
entertainment not having yet set in.

The more I reflect upon those days, the more surprising does it seem that
I was not in love with her. It may be that I was, unconsciously, for she
troubled my thoughts occasionally, and she represented all the qualities
I admired in her sex. The situation that had existed at the time of our
first and only quarrel had been reversed, I was on the highroad to the
worldly success I had then resolved upon, Nancy was poor, and for that
reason, perhaps, prouder than ever. If she was inaccessible to others,
she had the air of being peculiarly inaccessible to me--the more so
because some of the superficial relics of our intimacy remained, or
rather had been restored. Her very manner of camaraderie seemed
paradoxically to increase the distance between us. It piqued me. Had she
given me the least encouragement, I am sure I should have responded; and
I remember that I used occasionally to speculate as to whether she still
cared for me, and took this method of hiding her real feelings. Yet, on
the whole, I felt a certain complacency about it all; I knew that
suffering was disagreeable, I had learned how to avoid it, and I may have
had, deep within me, a feeling that I might marry her after all.
Meanwhile my life was full, and gave promise of becoming even fuller,
more absorbing and exciting in the immediate future.

One of the most fascinating figures, to me, of that Order being woven,
like a cloth of gold, out of our hitherto drab civilization,--an Order
into which I was ready and eager to be initiated,--was that of Adolf
Scherer, the giant German immig