He betook himself to the club. It was usually deserted; if a man did enter, he raced through and away as if pursued by demons; at luncheon all ate as if struggling for a prize offered to him who should chew the least, swallow the fastest, and finish the soonest. He called on the women he met—they were out or just going out, or just coming in to busy themselves at home.
In New York, Boston, Washington he had thought the leisure class a lame imitation of the European class of industrious, experienced idlers, had found it small and peculiarly unsatisfactory because its men were inferior to its women in numbers and especially in brains. But here—there wasn’t a pretence of a leisure class except the loungers in the parks; and they were threatening, so it was said, to organize and do all sorts of dreadful things if they weren’t given something to do. “This is a howling wilderness,” he said to himself. “I should be better off in a desert. These lunatics make my head swim.”
Wherever he went, all seemed possessed of and pursued by fever-demons. If it was a dinner, the diners were eager to despatch it. The courses were served swiftly, the waiters snatching one’s plate if he for a second ceased the machine-like lifting of food; the conversation was nervous and in the shrill tones of acute mental excitement. Words were cut short and slapped together almost incoherently. Sentences were left unfinished, the speaker leaping on to another sentence or submerged by the breaking of the flimsy speech-dam of the person he was addressing. Often all were talking at the same time. “Surely you can listen as you talk,” said a woman to whom he complained. “Think how much time it saves!”
If it was a dance, the orchestra detonated the notes like cartridges from a Maxim gun; the dancers whirled or raced furiously. “Why this hurry?” he gasped to a handsome, powerful girl, who had dragged him round a ballroom twice, had flung him into a chair, and was dashing away with another man to finish the waltz.
“I’ve got to catch the train for the millennium,” she screamed back over her shoulder and disappeared in the maelstrom.
Even at the play the audience shuffled uneasily while the players sped through their lines or the orchestra rattled off the between-the-acts music; and afterward all rushed from the theatre as if it were afire. The blank expression habitual to Frothingham’s face was now less a disguise than a reflection of his internal state.
“I must get out of this,” he said to himself at the end of two weeks. “The disease may be catching. Now I understand that fellow who went from here to tear London up by the roots and put in his tuppenny tubes. A Chicagoan should be barred from a country like any other plague.” And he wrote his sister that he was “beginning to twitch with the Chicago disease.”
Evelyn had written him regularly—a letter by each Wednesday’s steamer. She had put a brave face upon their affairs, had tried to make him picture life at Beauvais House as smooth, almost happy. But he had more than suspected that a far different story ran between the lines; and when she wrote that she had engaged herself to Charley Sidney he understood.
Seven months before he would have grumbled and cursed, and would have accepted the sacrifice. Now, it roused in him a fierce protest, a feeling of abhorrence of which he would not have been capable before he visited America—and the Barneys. “She sha’n’t sell herself to that creeping cad,” he said, and on impulse he cabled: “Sidney impossible and unnecessary. You must break it. Answer.”