Clive Standish watched them thread their way through the crowd, until Anice’s dainty little head with its crown of shimmering bronze hair was lost to sight. Then he sat looking moodily out on the heterogeneous, ill-assorted company before him.
Now that he had talked with Anice he no longer regretted the impulse that had led him to accept Mrs. Conover’s invitation. The girl had always exerted a subtle charm, a nameless influence, over him. Years before, when he was struggling, penniless, to make a living in a city where his family name opened every door to him, yet where it was more of an impediment than otherwise in his task of bread winning; even then he had worked with a vague, half-formed hope of Anice Lanier sharing his final victory.
Then had come her own financial reverses, her father’s death, and her withdrawal from the world that had known them both. Since that time circumstances had checked their growing intimacy. It was pleasant to Standish to feel that that intimacy and understanding were now renewed almost just where they had left off. His battle for livelihood and success had beaten from him much of the buoyancy that had once been his charm. Anice seemed the one link connecting him with Youth—the link whereby he might one day win his way back to that dear lost country of his boyish hopes and dreams. It would be good to forget, with her, the dreary uphill struggle that was so bitter and youth-sapping when endured alone. Then he laughed grimly at his own silly fantasy, and came back to every-day self-control.
The rooms were clearing. Clive got to his feet and followed the general drift toward the enormous ball-room in the rear of the mansion that had for the occasion been converted into a banquet hall.
On the way he encountered a long, lean, pasty-faced young man who hailed him with a weary:
“Hello, Standish! Didn’t expect to see you here. Beastly bore, isn’t it? And the governor dragged me all the way from New York to show up at it.”
“You spend most of your time in New York nowadays, don’t you, Jerry?” said Clive.
“Say, old chap,” protested young Conover, “cut out the ‘Jerry,’ can’t you? My Christian name’s Gerald. ‘Jerry’ was all right enough when I was a kid in this one-horse provincial hole. But it would swamp a man of my standing in New York.”
Clive had a fair idea of the “standing” in question. A half-baked lad, turned out of Harvard after two years of futile loafing, sent on a trip around the world (that culminated in a delightfully misspent year in Paris), at last coming home with a well-grounded contempt for his native city, and turned loose at his own request on long-suffering New York, with more money than belonged to him and fewer brains than sufficed to keep it. This in a nutshell was the history—so far as the world at large knew—of Caleb Conover’s only son.
From time to time newspaper accounts of beaten cabmen, suppers that ended in police stations, and similar feats of youthful gayety and culture had floated to Granite. Yet Caleb Conover, otherwise so rigid in the matter of appearances, read such accounts with relish, and boasted loudly of the swath his son was cutting in Gotham society. For, on Gerald’s word, Conover was firmly assured that this was the true career of a young man of fashion. It represented all he had missed in his own poverty-fighting early manhood, and he rejoiced in his son’s good times.