Bonbright played with her. Somehow she came to represent recreation in his life. She was jolly, a splendid sportswoman, who could hold her own with him at golf or tennis, and who drove an automobile as he would never have dared to drive.
She was not beautiful, but she was attractive, and the center of her attractiveness was her wholesomeness, her frankness, her simplicity. … He could talk to her as he could not talk even to her father, yet he could not open his heart fully even to her. He could not show her the soul tissues that throbbed and ached.
He was lonely. A lonely boy thrown with an attractive girl is a fertile field for the sowing of love. But Bonbright was not in love with Hilda…. The idea did not occur to him. There was excellent reason—though he had not arrived at a realization of it, and this excellent reason was Ruth Frazer.
He had ventured to accept Ruth's impulsive invitation to come to see her. Not frequently, not so frequently as his inclinations urged, but more frequently than was, perhaps, wise in his position…. She represented a new experience. She was utterly outside his world, and so wholly different from the girls of his world. It was an attractive difference…. And her grin! When it glowed for him he felt for the moment as if the world were really a pleasant place to spend one's life.
He learned from her. New ideas and comprehensions came to him as a result of her conversations with him. Through her eyes he was seeing the other side. Not all her theories, not even all her facts, could he accept, but no matter how radical, no matter how incendiary her words, he delighted to hear her voice uttering them. In short, Bonbright Foote VII, prince of the Foote Dynasty, was in danger of falling in love with the beggar maid.
So, many diverse forces and individualities were at work upon the molding of Bonbright Foote. One, and one only, he recognized, and that was the stern, ever-apparent, iron-handed wrenching of his father. There were times, which grew more and more frequent, when he fancied he had surrendered utterly to it and had handed over his soul to Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. He fancied he was sitting by apathetically watching the family tradition squeeze it into the desired form….
After a wretched day he had called on Ruth. The next morning soft-footed Rangar had moved shadowlike into his father's office, and presently his father summoned him to come in.
"I am informed," said the gentleman who was devoting his literary talents to a philosophical biography of the Marquis Lafayette, Hero of Two Worlds, friend of Liberty and Equality, "that you have been going repeatedly to the house of that girl who formerly was your secretary—whose mother runs a boarding house for anarchists."
The suddenness, the unexpectedness of attack upon this angle, nonplussed Bonbright. He could only stand silent, stamped with the guilty look of youth.
"Is it true?" snapped his father.