But he had only twelve hundred dollars left, including the thousand from Wallingford. “I must be gone clean mad,” he exclaimed whenever he wasn’t with her and was alone with his affairs. Finally he was able to goad himself into dashing feverishly about in Chicago society. He sought the set she avoided--it was to him an additional charm in her that she did avoid it, for he had at bottom the extra-prim ideas of women which have never lost their hold upon Englishmen. There was, however, no alternative to seeking this set. He thought it the only one in which he was likely to succeed--those among the fashionable young women of the rich families who carried the “free-and-easy” pose in speech and manner to the point where it looked far worse to a foreigner than it really was, who laughed and talked noisily in public, who wore very loud and very clinging dresses, very big hats and very tight shoes. The newspapers gave him columns of free advertising and, with the Barneys vouching for him and “Wick” Barney pushing him, he immediately became a figure. Some of the young women of the “lively” set pursued him with an ardour which he would have mistaken when he first landed for evidence of serious attachment or intentions. But he had learned something of the ways of American flirts, married and single, and he had had experience of that American curiosity as to foreigners of rank which he had at first regarded as the frankest kind of title-worship. Presently he found a girl he thought he could not be mistaken in fancying he could get--Jane or Jenny (Jeanne, she wrote it) Hooper, the daughter of that famous Amzi Hooper whose “Hooper’s High-class Hams” and “Hooper’s Excelsior Dressed Beef and Beef Extract” are trumpeted from newspaper, billboard, and blank wall throughout the land. Her older sister had married a Papal duke under the impression that he was a noble of ancient and proud family. To her horror, to her family’s humiliation, and to her friends’ hilarity, it came out that the Duke of Valdonomia was the son of a Swiss hog-packer of as humble origin as Amzi Hooper and of less than one-fifth his wealth. The family longed to possess a genuine nobleman, and Jane, a devourer of the English novels which are written by the middle classes for the middle classes about the upper classes--seemed to be in sympathy with her father’s and mother’s ambition and keenly eager to become a “real lady.” It was assumed by her set that Frothingham had come for her--the newspapers hinted as much several times each week.