Being thus fortunately founded, I took Morton into my confidence. He was a patrician by birth and present station; and I knew I might have both his hand and his wisdom for what was in my heart. When I laid open my thought to Morton, he stood at gaze like one planet-struck, while that inevitable eyeglass dropped from his amazed nose.
“You must pardon my staring,” said he, at last. “It was a beastly rude thing to do. But, really, don't y' know, I was surprised that one of force and depth, and who was happily outside society, should find himself so badly guided as to seek to enter it.”
“You, yourself, are in its midst.”
“That should be charged,” he returned, “to accident rather than design. I am in the midst of society, precisely as some unfortunate tree might be found in the middle of its native swamp, and only because being born there I want of that original energy required for my transplantation. I will say this,” continued Morton, getting up to walk the floor; “your introduction into what we'll style the Four Hundred, don't y' know, might easily be brought about. You have now a deal of wealth; and that of itself should be enough, as the annals of our Four Hundred offer ample guaranty. But more than that, stands the argument of your power, and how you, in your peculiar fashion, are unique. Gad, for the latter cause alone, swelldom would welcome you with spread arms; it would, really! But believe me, if it were happiness you came seeking you would miss it mightily. There is more laughter in Third Avenue than in Fifth.”
“But it is of my Blossom I am thinking,” I cried. “For myself I am not so ambitious.”
“And what should your daughter,” said Morton, “find worth her young while in society? She is, I hear from you, a girl of sensibility. That true, she would find nothing but disappointment in this region you think so select. Do you know our smart set? Sir, it is composed of savages in silk.” Morton, I found, had much the manner of his father, when stirred. “It is,” he went on, “that circle where discussion concerns itself with nothing more onerous than golf or paper-chases or singlestickers or polo or balls or scandals; where there is no literature save the literature of the bankbook; where snobs invent a pedigree and play at caste; where folk give lawn parties to dogs and dinners to which monkeys come as guests of honor; where quarrels occur over questions of precedence between a mosquito and a flea; where pleasure is a trade, and idleness an occupation; in short, it is that place where the race, bruised of riches, has turned cancerous and begun to rot.”
“You draw a vivid picture,” said I, not without a tincture of derision. “For all that, I stick by my determination, and ask your help. I tell you it is my daughter's life or death.”
Morton, at this, relapsed into his customary attitude of moral, mental Lah-de-dah, and his lisp and his drawl and his eyeglass found their usual places. He shrugged his shoulders in his manner of the superfine.
“Why then,” said he, “and seeing that you will have no other way for it, you may command my services. Really, I shall be proud to introduce you, don't y' know, as one who, missing being a monkey by birth, is now determined to become one by naturalization. Now I should say that a way to begin would be to discover a dinner and have you there as a guest. I know a society queen who will jump at the chance; she will have you at her chariot wheel like another Caractacus in another Rome, and parade you as a latest captive to her social bow and spear. I'll tell her; it will offer an excellent occasion for you to declare your intentions and take out your first papers in that Apeland whereof you seem so strenuous to become a citizen.”
While the work put upon me by my place as Boss had never an end, but filled both my day and my night to overflowing, it brought with it compensation. If I were ground and worn away on the wheel of my position like a knife on a grindstone, still I was kept to keenest edge, and I felt that joy I've sometimes thought a good blade must taste in the sheer fact of its trenchant quality. Besides, there would now and then arrive a moment which taught me how roundly I had conquered, and touched me with that sense of power which offers the highest pleasure whereof the soul of man is capable. Here would be an example of what I mean, although I cannot believe the thing could happen in any country save America or any city other than New York.