§ 2
They returned to the hotel, where there were engagements—a whole world waiting to be conquered. But Sylvia delivered an ultimatum; she would pay no attention to anyone until she had an hour alone with Frank. When Aunt Varina had meekly left her, she first flew into Frank’s arms and permitted him to kiss her; and then, seated decorously in a separate chair, she proceeded to explain to him the mystery of her presence there.
She had come to New York to buy clothes for herself and the rest of the family; that much Frank had known. He had begged her to run up to Cambridge, but the family had refused permission. Celeste was going to have a house party, the baby had been having more convulsions—these were only two of a dozen reasons why she must return. Frank had been intending to go down to New York to see her—when suddenly had come a telegram, saying that she would arrive the next afternoon.
“It was my scheme,” she said, “and I expect you to be proud of me when you hear it. If you scold me about it, Frank——!” She said this with the tone of voice that she used when it was necessary to disarm some one.
It was difficult for Frank to imagine himself objecting to any device which had brought her there. “Go ahead, honey,” said he.
“It has to do with Harley,” she explained. “Mother sent me one of his letters, telling about the terrible time he’s been having here. You see, he’s scared to death for fear he won’t make the ‘Dickey’—or that he won’t be among the earlier tens. So they were all upset, and they’ve been scurrying round getting letters of introduction for him, moving heaven and earth to get him in with the right people. I read his letter, and then suddenly the thought flashed over me, ‘There’s my chance!’ Don’t you see?”
“No,” said Frank, and shook his head—“I don’t see at all.”
“Sometimes,” said the girl, “when I think about you, I get frightened, because—if you knew how wicked I really am—! Well, anyhow, I sat down and wrote to Harley that he was a goose, and that if he had sense enough to get me to Harvard, he’d make the ‘Dickey,’ and one of the ‘final’ clubs as well. I told him to write Aunt Nannie at once; and sure enough, just about the time they got Harley’s letter, there came a telegram saying I might come!”
It was impossible for Frank not to laugh—if it were only because Sylvia was so happy. “So,” he said, “you’ve come to be a social puller-in for Harley!”
“Now, Frank, don’t be horrid! I saw it this way—and it’s obvious arithmetic: If I do this, I’ll see Frank part of every day for a couple of weeks; if I don’t, I’ll only see him for a day when he comes to New York. There’s only one trouble—you must promise not to mind.”
“What is it?”
“We must not tell anybody that we’re engaged. If people knew that, I couldn’t do much with them.”
“But I’ve told some people.”
“Whom?”
“Well, my room-mate.”
“He’s not a club man, so that won’t matter. It doesn’t really matter, if we simply don’t announce it. You must promise not to mind, Frank—be good, and let me have my fun in my foolish way, and you sit by and smile, as you did in the car.”
Frank’s answer was that he expected to sit by and smile all his life; a statement which led to a discussion between them, for Sylvia made objection to his desire to shrink from the world, and declared that she meant to fight for him, and manage him, and make something out of him. When these discussions arose he would laugh, in his quiet, good-natured way, and picture himself as a diplomat at St. James’, wearing knee-breeches and winning new empires by means of the smiles of “Lady Sunshine.” “But, you forget one thing,” he said—“that I came to Harvard to learn something.”
“When you go out into the world,” propounded Sylvia, “you’ll realize that the things one knows aren’t half so important as the people one knows.”
Frank laughed. “That wouldn’t be such a bad motto for our Alma Mater,” he said; then, thinking it over, “They might put it up as an inscription, where Freshmen with social ambitions could learn it. A motto for all college climbers—‘Not the things one knows, but the people one knows!’”
Sylvia was looking at him, a trifle worried. “Frank,” she said, “suppose you go through life finding fault with everything in that fashion?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “But I shall always fight a wrong when I see one. Wait till you’ve been here a while, and you’ll see about this!”
“I ought to have come before,” she said; “I could have solved so many problems for you. It’s the same everywhere in life—those who are out rail at those who are in, but when you hear both sides, you see the matter differently. I’ve a grudge against you, Frank—you misrepresented things. You told me they had abolished the Fraternity system here, and I didn’t know about the clubs, and so I permitted you to be a ‘goat.’”
“They call it a ‘rough-neck’ here,” he corrected.
“Well, a ‘rough-neck.’ Anyway, I let you take a back seat. And just as if you didn’t have ability——”
“Ability!” Frank exclaimed. Then, checking himself, he went on gently to explain the social system he had found at Harvard. In the Southern colleges, ability and good breeding might still get a poor man recognition. But the clubs here were run by a little group of Boston and New York society men, who had been kept in a “set” from the day they were born. They went to kindergarten together, to dancing school together—their sisters had private sewing circles, instead of those at church. They had their semi-private dormitories on Auburn Street—one might come with a string of automobiles and a stud of polo ponies, but he would find that his money would not rent one of those places unless the crowd had given its O. K. They roomed apart, they ate and drank apart, and the men in their own class never even met them.
Sylvia listened in bewilderment. “Surely, Frank,” she exclaimed, “there must be some friendliness——”
He smiled. “Just as I said, honey—you’re judging by the South. We’ve snobbery enough there, God knows—but some of us are kind-hearted. You can’t imagine things up here—how cold and formal people are. They have their millions of dollars and the social position this gives them; they are jealous of those who have more and suspicious of those who have less—and they’ve been that way for so long that every plain human feeling is dead in them. Take a man like Douglas van Tuiver, for example. You’ve heard of him, I suppose?”
“I’ve heard of the van Tuivers, of course.”
“Well, Douglas is our bright particular social star just now. He’s inherited from three estates already—the Lord only knows how many tens of millions in his own right. He’s gone the ‘Gold Coast’ crowd one better—has his own private house here in Cambridge, and an apartment in Boston also, I’m told. He entered society there at the same time that he entered college; and he doesn’t think much of our social life—except the little set he’d already met in Boston and New York. He’s stiff and serious as a chief justice—self-conscious, condescending——”
“Do you know him?” asked Sylvia.
“I never met him, of course; but I see him all the time, because he’s in some of my sections.”
“In some of your sections!” cried Sylvia. “And you never met him?”
The other laughed. “You see, honey,” he said, “how little you are able to imagine life at Harvard! Douglas, my dear, has been yachting with English peers; he has Scotch earls for ancestors, and an accent that he has acquired in their honor. He sets more store by them, I suppose, than he does by his old Knickerbocker ancestors, who left him several farms between Fifth and Madison Avenues.”
“Is he a club man?” asked Sylvia.
“He lives to set the social standards for our clubs; a sort of arbiter elegantiarum. It’s one of the sayings they attribute to him, that he came to Harvard because American university life was in need of ‘tone.’”
“Oh, dear me!” exclaimed Sylvia; and again, in a lower voice, “Oh, dear me!” She pondered, and then with sudden interest inquired, “He’d be a good man for Harley to meet, wouldn’t he?”
“None better,” smiled Frank, “if he wants to make the ‘Dickey.’”
“Then,” said Sylvia, “he’s the man I’d best go after.”
The other laughed. “All right, honey. But you’ll find him hard to interest, I warn you. His career has all been planned—he’s to marry Dorothy Cortlandt, who’ll bring him ten or twenty millions more.”
And Sylvia set her lips in a dangerous expression. “He can marry Dorothy Cortlandt,” she said, “but not until I’ve got through with him!”