But presently he put forth his will. “Pshaw!” he said, almost aloud, “how foolish! I am young, I am strong, I have the love of the best woman on earth; she would not believe if they told her! I can win, and I will win!”
He laughed aloud, because the street was still, and the night was deep. He flung up his arms and spread them wide, taking a long, deep breath of the sweet air. “I will win, win it all—her and everything besides—Congress, Governor, the Senate—all!” He strode along erect and calm, full of a vast faith in his own lusty powers, full of the sublime confidence of youth.
III
EMILY HARKNESS might easily have been the leader of what the local newspapers, imitating those of Chicago, had recently begun to call the “Smart Set,” a position which would have entitled her to the distinction of being the most popular girl in town, but because she did not accept the position, she was perhaps the most unpopular girl in town. “Society,” in Grand Prairie, lacked too much in what is known as eligible young men, for while the town produced the normal quantity of that product, those who were strong and ambitious went away to Chicago or St. Louis where, in a day of economical tendencies that were fast making the small towns of a more prosperous past but a shaded and sleepy tradition, there were larger fields for their young efforts. Those that were left were employed in their fathers’ businesses, and some of them worked in the three banks of the town, but while these were able, out of their scant salaries, to arrange for a series of assembly balls in the dining-room of the Cassell House every winter, they found calls upon the girls, in whose parlors they would rock all the evening, chaffing each other with personalities, their nearest approach to the society life.
The social activities of the place were therefore left largely to the initiative of the elder women, who formed the usual number of clubs, held the usual number of meetings, and derived, possibly, the usual amount of benefit therefrom. These clubs were inaugurated under a serious pretense of feeding starved intellectualities, and were impregnated at the first with a strong literary flavor, but in the end they administered to a bodily rather than a mental hunger, and their profound programs degenerated into mere menus.
The men of Grand Prairie soon learned to identify the days on which the club meetings fell by the impaired appetites their wives showed at the supper table, and the louder tones in which they talked all the evening. Ultimately, when the euchre club had evolved into the higher stage of the whist club, the men became expert enough to tell, by the absence of the vocal phenomenon already noted, the days on which the card tournaments were held.
When Emily Harkness came home from the Eastern college where she had taken a bachelor’s degree, it was thought that she would be a decided acquisition to society, a fact that was duly exploited in the Grand Prairie newspapers. The young men of the town at once began to call, but when they found that she did not enter into the spirit of those little personalities which formed the sinew of what they called their conversation, and when they learned that she would not endure the familiarity that the other girls of the town indulged them in, they began one by one to fail in these well-meant attentions. Several of them, out of a devotion to the spirit of social duty, tried for a while to cultivate, or at the least to assume, a literary taste that would admit them to her confidence. But their reading had been limited to the Chicago Sunday newspapers, the works of the Duchess and to the most widely advertised novels of the swashbuckler school, and they could only stare vacantly when she soared into the rarer altitudes of the culture she had acquired at college, where she had had a course of Browning lectures and out of a superficial tutoring in art had espoused with enthusiasm the then prospering cause of Realism.
Failing in literature, a few of the more determined of these youths essayed music, but when she played for them Chopin’s nocturnes and asked if they liked Brahms, whose name they could never learn to pronounce, they gave her up, and fled with relief to the banjo, the mandolin, and the coon songs that echoed not inharmoniously on summer nights along the borders of Silver Lake, as they called the muddy pond where the aquatic needs of Grand Prairie society are appeased. Emily could not follow them thither, for she would not consent to buggy rides, even on moonlight nights. And so the young men of Grand Prairie voted her “stuck up,” and to themselves justified their verdict by the fact that she made them by some silent spiritual coercion call her Miss Harkness instead of Em, or Emily at least.
As for the clubs, she continued to attend them occasionally, for she was needed to prepare papers on literary topics for the federated meetings held monthly in the Presbyterian church. The matrons of the town would listen to her with the folds in their chins multiplying as their faces lengthened and their bodies yielded to the cushioned pews of the warm tabernacle, but however conscientiously they tried to follow her, their winks would develop into nods, and they would fail asleep. At the conclusion of her papers, of course, they gave Emily their gloved hands in congratulation, but the gulf between them yawned wider and wider, until Emily became a mere intellectual rather than a human personality.