to comprehend.
“I pay my fare,” he said quietly.
Samuel turned red and his hands clinched, but the conductor was looking their way, so at a warning nod from his friends he subsided into sullen gloom.
They reached their destination and left the car, but so did the laborer, who followed them, swinging his little pail. Seeing his chance, Samuel no longer resisted his aristocratic inclination. He turned around and, launching a full-featured, dime-novel sneer, made a loud remark about the right of the lower animals to ride with human beings.
In a half-second the workman had dropped his pail and let fly at him. Unprepared, Samuel took the blow neatly on the jaw and sprawled full length into the cobblestone gutter.
“Don’t laugh at me!” cried his assailant. “I been workin’ all day. I’m tired as hell!”
As he spoke the sudden anger died out of his eyes and the mask of weariness dropped again over his face. He turned and picked up his pail. Samuel’s friends took a quick step in his direction.
“Wait!” Samuel had risen slowly and was motioning them back. Some time, somewhere, he had been struck like that before. Then he remembered—Gilly Hood. In the silence, as he dusted himself off, the whole scene in the room at Andover was before his eyes—and he knew intuitively that he had been wrong again. This man’s strength, his rest, was the protection of his family. He had more use for his seat in the street-car than any young girl.
“It’s all right,” said Samuel gruffly. “Don’t touch him. I’ve been a damn fool.”
Of course it took more than an hour, or a week, for Samuel to rearrange his ideas on the essential importance of good form. At first he simply admitted that his wrongness had made him powerless—as it had made him powerless against Gilly—but eventually his mistake about the workman influenced his entire attitude. Snobbishness is, after all, merely good breeding grown dictatorial; so Samuel’s code remained, but the necessity of imposing it upon others had faded out in a certain gutter. Within that year his class had somehow stopped referring to him as a snob.
III.
After a few years Samuel’s university decided that it had shone long enough in the reflected glory of his neckties, so they declaimed to him in Latin, charged him ten dollars for the paper which proved him irretrievably educated, and sent him into the turmoil with much self-confidence, a few friends, and the proper assortment of harmless bad habits.
His family had by that time started back to shirt-sleeves, through a sudden decline in the sugar-market, and it had already unbuttoned its vest, so to speak, when Samuel went to work. His mind was that exquisite tabula rasa that a university education sometimes leaves, but he had both energy and influence, so he used his former ability as a dodging half-back in twisting through Wall Street crowds as runner for a bank.
His diversion was—women. There were half a dozen: two or three débutantes, an actress (in a minor way), a grass-widow, and one sentimental little brunette who was married and lived in a little house in Jersey City.
They had met on a ferry-boat. Samuel was crossing from New York on business (he had been working several years by this time) and he helped her look for a package that she had dropped in the crush.
“Do you come over often?” he inquired casually.
“Just to shop,” she said shyly. She had great brown eyes and the pathetic kind of little mouth. “I’ve only been married three months, and we find it cheaper to live over here.”
“Does he—does your husband like your being alone like this?”
She laughed, a cheery young laugh.
“Oh, dear me, no. We were to meet for dinner but I must have misunderstood the place. He’ll be awfully worried.”
“Well,” said Samuel disapprovingly, “he ought to be. If you’ll allow me I’ll see you home.”
She accepted his offer thankfully, so they took the cable-car together. When they walked up the path to her little house they saw a light there; her husband had arrived before her.
“He’s frightfully jealous,” she announced, laughingly apologetic.
“Very well,” answered Samuel, rather stiffly. “I’d better leave you here.”
She thanked him and, waving a good night, he left her.
That would have been quite all if they hadn’t met on Fifth Avenue one morning a week later. She started and blushed and seemed so glad to see him that they chatted like old friends. She was going to her dressmaker’s, eat lunch alone at Taine’s, shop all afternoon, and meet her husband on the ferry at five. Samuel told her that her husband was a very lucky man. She blushed again and scurried off.
Samuel whistled all the way back to his office, but about twelve o’clock he began to see that pathetic, appealing little mouth everywhere—and those brown eyes. He fidgeted when he looked at the clock; he thought of the grill down-stairs where he lunched and the heavy male conversation thereof, and opposed to that picture appeared another: a little table at Taine’s with the brown eyes and the mouth a few feet away. A few minutes before twelve-thirty he dashed on his hat and rushed for the cable-car.
She was quite surprised to see him.
“Why—hello,” she said. Samuel could tell that she was just pleasantly frightened.
“I thought we might lunch together. It’s so dull eating with a lot of men.”
She hesitated.
“Why, I suppose there’s no harm in it. How could there be!”
It occurred to her that her husband should have taken lunch with her—but he was generally so hurried at noon. She told Samuel all about him: he was a little smaller than Samuel, but, oh, much better-looking. He was a bookkeeper and not making a lot of money, but they were very happy and expected to be rich within three or four years.
Samuel’s grass-widow had been in a quarrelsome mood for three or four weeks, and, through contrast, he took an accentuated pleasure in this meeting; so fresh was she, and earnest, and faintly adventurous. Her name was Marjorie.
They made another engagement; in fact, for a month they lunched together two or three times a week. When she was sure that her husband would work late Samuel took her over to New Jersey on the ferry, leaving her always on the tiny front porch, after she had gone in and lit the gas to use the security of his masculine presence outside. This grew to be a ceremony—and it annoyed him. Whenever the comfortable glow fell out through the front windows, that was his congé; yet he never suggested coming in and Marjorie didn’t invite him.
Then, when Samuel and Marjorie had reached a stage in which they sometimes touched each other’s arms gently, just to show that they were very good friends, Marjorie and her husband had one of those ultrasensitive, supercritical quarrels that couples never indulge in unless they care a great deal about each other. It started with a cold mutton-chop or a leak in the gas-jet—and one day Samuel found her in Taine’s, with dark shadows under her brown eyes and a terrifying pout.
By this time Samuel thought he was in love with Marjorie—so
