MacRae did himself rather well, as the English say, when he reached Vancouver. This was a holiday, and he was disposed to make the most of it. He put up at the Granada. He made a few calls and presently found himself automatically relaunched upon Vancouver's social waters. There were a few maids and more than one matron who recalled pleasantly this straight up-standing youngster with the cool gray eyes who had come briefly into their ken the winter before. There were a few fellows he had known in squadron quarters overseas, home for good now that demobilization was fairly complete. MacRae danced well. He had the faculty of making himself agreeable without effort. He found it pleasant to fall into the way of these careless, well-dressed folk whose greatest labor seemed to be in amusing themselves, to keep life from seeming "slow." Buttressed by revenues derived from substantial sources, mines, timber, coastal fisheries, land, established industries, these sons and daughters of the pioneers, many but one degree removed from pioneering uncouthness, were patterning their lives upon the plan of equivalent classes in older regions. If it takes six generations in Europe to make a gentleman, western America quite casually dispenses with five, and the resulting product seldom suffers by comparison.
As the well-to-do in Europe flung themselves into revelry with the signing of the armistice, so did they here. Four years of war had corked the bottle of gayety. The young men were all overseas. Life was a little too cloudy during that period to be gay. Shadows hung over too many homes. But that was past. They had pulled the cork and thrown it away, one would think. Pleasure was king, to be served with light abandon.
It was a fairly vigorous place, MacRae discovered. He liked it, gave himself up to it gladly,—for a while. It involved no mental effort. These people seldom spoke of money, or of work, or politics, the high cost of living, international affairs. If they did it was jocularly, sketchily, as matters of no importance. Their talk ran upon dances, clothes, motoring, sports indoors and afield, on food,—and sometimes genially on drink, since the dry wave had not yet drained their cellars.
MacRae floated with this tide. But he was not wholly carried away with it. He began to view it impersonally, to wonder if it were the real thing, if this was what inspired men to plot and scheme and struggle laboriously for money, or if it were just the froth on the surface of realities which he could not quite grasp. He couldn't say. There was a dash and glitter about it that charmed him. He could warm and thrill to the beauty of a Granada ballroom, music that seduced a man's feet, beauty of silk and satin, of face and figure, of bright eyes and gleaming jewels, a blending of all the primary colors and every shade between, flashing over a polished floor under high, carved ceilings.
He had surrendered Nelly Abbott to a claimant and stood watching the swirl and glide of the dancers in the Granada one night. His eyes were on the brilliance a little below the raised area at one end of the floor, and so was his mind, inquiringly, with the curious concentration of which his mind was capable. Presently he became aware of some one speaking to him, tugging at his elbow.
"Oh, come out of it," a voice said derisively.
He looked around at Stubby Abbott.
"Regular trance. I spoke to you twice. In love?"
"Uh-uh. Just thinking," MacRae laughed.
"Deep thinking, I'll say. Want to go down to the billiard room and smoke?"