Bildungsromans; Families -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; New England -- Fiction
The windows of The Worthy had held an especial fascination. It wasn’t
altogether the care-free college singing, the Mardi-Gras spirit, the
_esprit de corps_ among all college men in town that night. It was a
sense of his own inability to attain to what these things stood for
without hurting some one to do it. He would have liked to be dining in
such a place, across a snowy table from a beautifully gowned woman,—like
it very, very much. But probably the fellow whom he had watched with
that princess in black tulle thought nothing of it. That was his life.
He placed no value on the delights of high-caste living because he had
never known anything else. He disclosed it by his poise and easy
familiarity with his environment, his graceful behavior and carriage in
juxtaposition to his charming companion. Economists and peanut
politicians might rail that America has no classes or castes. What a
mockery! Between the lowly-born and the purple must ever exist a gulf as
wide as the planets. It was not something to be attained: it was a
heritage. At least he believed so.
Nathan went to his hotel down near the railroad arch and tried to get
solace from a cigar. It was a very expensive cigar. It had cost him
thirty-five cents. But it was Job’s comfort. He might make a fortune, he
might buy clothes that cost thousands and smoke thirty-five-cent cigars
by the bale, but that would never give the provincial the easy grace and
the utter lack of self-consciousness displayed by that fellow and girl
outlined in the Wonder Window. For it was a Wonder Window to poor
Nathan. It opened in a Castle Wall where the tatterdemalion crowd passed
underneath to wend their clodhopper turkey tracks to mud huts out on the
edge of the moor.
“And I suppose, if dad had only been minded that way, I might have
worked my way through college and been in such a place with a crowd of
revelers and such a woman across from me to-night,” he said bitterly.
“Yet my problem is how to overcome that handicap now. How can I? What
must I do? Some one ought to write a book on how to climb out of
mediocrity and Be Somebody!”
Be Somebody! That was Milly’s code now. But what a mess she was making
of it! Some one ought to write a book to help women to be somebody,
also. Hang it all, what was the matter with life, anyhow? Where in it
all was the great constructive purpose?
Nathan never forgot that night in Springfield when all unwittingly he
had beheld Madelaine Theddon above him in the hotel window. Not because
he had seen Madelaine and remembered her, but because of the events
which followed swiftly.
He had just retired to bed and pushed the button extinguishing his lamp,
to lie and ponder on the problem of how he could Be Somebody, when two
sharp taps came at his door. He arose and opened it a crack.
“Telegram, sir!” said the lad outside.
Nathan reached for his vest and gave the boy ten cents. Then he sank
down on the edge of his bed and tore the end of the flimsy yellow
envelope.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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