第92章 PART THIRD(23)

"Well,I don't know.We all respect money.""Yes,but Miss Vance's position is so secure.She needn't pay court to those stupid,vulgar people.""Well,let's console ourselves with the belief that she would,if she needed.Such people as the Dryfooses are the raw material of good society.It isn't made up of refined or meritorious people--professors and litterateurs,ministers and musicians,and their families.All the fashionable people there to-night were like the Dryfooses a generation or two ago.I dare say the material works up faster now,and in a season or two you won't know the Dryfooses from the other plutocrats.THEY will--a little better than they do now;they'll see a difference,but nothing radical,nothing painful.People who get up in the world by service to others--through letters,or art,or science--may have their modest little misgivings as to their social value,but people that rise by money--especially if their gains are sudden--never have.And that's the kind of people that form our nobility;there's no use pretending that we haven't a nobility;we might as well pretend we haven't first-class cars in the presence of a vestibuled Pullman.Those girls had no more doubt of their right to be there than if they had been duchesses:we thought it was very nice of Miss Vance to come and ask us,but they didn't;they weren't afraid,or the least embarrassed;they were perfectly natural--like born aristocrats.And you may be sure that if the plutocracy that now owns the country ever sees fit to take on the outward signs of an aristocracy --titles,and arms,and ancestors--it won't falter from any inherent question of its worth.Money prizes and honors itself,and if there is anything it hasn't got,it believes it can buy it."Well,Basil,"said his wife,"I hope you won't get infected with Lindau's ideas of rich people.Some of them are very good and kind.""Who denies that?Not even Lindau himself.It's all right.And the great thing is that the evening's enjoyment is over.I've got my society smile off,and I'm radiantly happy.Go on with your little pessimistic diatribes,Isabel;you can't spoil my pleasure.""I could see,"said Mela,as she and Christine drove home together,"that she was as jealous as she could be,all the time you was talkun'to Mr.

Beaton.She pretended to be talkun'to Conrad,but she kep'her eye on you pretty close,I can tell you.I bet she just got us there to see how him and you would act together.And I reckon she was satisfied.He's dead gone on you,Chris."Christine listened with a dreamy pleasure to the flatteries with which Mela plied her in the hope of some return in kind,and not at all because she felt spitefully toward Miss Vance,or in anywise wished her ill.

"Who was that fellow with you so long?"asked Christine."I suppose you turned yourself inside out to him,like you always do."Mela was transported by the cruel ingratitude."It's a lie!I didn't tell him a single thing."Conrad walked home,choosing to do so because he did not wish to hear his sisters'talk of the evening,and because there was a tumult in his spirit which he wished to let have its way.In his life with its single purpose,defeated by stronger wills than his own,and now struggling partially to fulfil itself in acts of devotion to others,the thought of women had entered scarcely more than in that of a child.His ideals were of a virginal vagueness;faces,voices,gestures had filled his fancy at times,but almost passionately;and the sensation that he now indulged was a kind of worship,ardent,but reverent and exalted.The brutal experiences of the world make us forget that there are such natures in it,and that they seem to come up out of the lowly earth as well as down from the high heaven.In the heart of this man well on toward thirty there had never been left the stain of a base thought;not that suggestion and conjecture had not visited him,but that he had not entertained them,or in any-wise made them his.In a Catholic age and country,he would have been one of those monks who are sainted after death for the angelic purity of their lives,and whose names are invoked by believers in moments of trial,like San Luigi Gonzaga.As he now walked along thinking,with a lover's beatified smile on his face,of how Margaret Vance had spoken and looked,he dramatized scenes in which be approved himself to her by acts of goodness and unselfishness,and died to please her for the sake of others.He made her praise him for them,to his face,when he disclaimed their merit,and after his death,when he could not.All the time he was poignantly sensible of her grace,her elegance,her style;they seemed to intoxicate him;some tones of her voice thrilled through his nerves,and some looks turned his brain with a delicious,swooning sense of her beauty;her refinement bewildered him.

But all this did not admit the idea of possession,even of aspiration.

At the most his worship only set her beyond the love of other men as far as beyond his own.