Instead of being relieved he repented his impulse, wondered where it had come from, fell into a profound depression. Seven months of stalking; nothing to show for it but three ridiculous, sickening misses. And here he was with an empty bag; and what little heart he once had for the game was gone; in its place a disgust for it and for himself. “How Nelly Barney would scorn me if she knew what a creature I am,” he said. He was now thinking a great deal on the subject of Nelly Barney’s standards for men and also on the subject of Nelly Barney as a standard for women. In neither direction did he find any encouragement. He knew her through being in the same house with her day after day, through seeing her at all hours and in all moods—and she never made the slightest attempt to conceal her real self. He felt that such a woman could not be attracted by his title, would not be likely to be attracted by himself; he felt that she was at the same time more worth the winning than any other woman he knew in America—“Yes, or in England,” he confessed at last.
“What a pity, what a beastly, frightful shame,” he thought. “She’s got everything that I must have, and everything that I want, too.”
But he had only twelve hundred dollars left, including the thousand from Wallingford. “I must be gone clean mad,” he exclaimed whenever he wasn’t with her and was alone with his affairs. Finally he was able to goad himself into dashing feverishly about in Chicago society. He sought the set she avoided—it was to him an additional charm in her that she did avoid it, for he had at bottom the extra-prim ideas of women which have never lost their hold upon Englishmen. There was, however, no alternative to seeking this set. He thought it the only one in which he was likely to succeed—those among the fashionable young women of the rich families who carried the “free-and-easy” pose in speech and manner to the point where it looked far worse to a foreigner than it really was, who laughed and talked noisily in public, who wore very loud and very clinging dresses, very big hats and very tight shoes.
The newspapers gave him columns of free advertising and, with the Barneys vouching for him and “Wick” Barney pushing him, he immediately became a figure. Some of the young women of the “lively” set pursued him with an ardour which he would have mistaken when he first landed for evidence of serious attachment or intentions. But he had learned something of the ways of American flirts, married and single, and he had had experience of that American curiosity as to foreigners of rank which he had at first regarded as the frankest kind of title-worship.
Presently he found a girl he thought he could not be mistaken in fancying he could get—Jane or Jenny (Jeanne, she wrote it) Hooper, the daughter of that famous Amzi Hooper whose “Hooper’s High-class Hams” and “Hooper’s Excelsior Dressed Beef and Beef Extract” are trumpeted from newspaper, billboard, and blank wall throughout the land.
Her older sister had married a Papal duke under the impression that he was a noble of ancient and proud family. To her horror, to her family’s humiliation, and to her friends’ hilarity, it came out that the Duke of Valdonomia was the son of a Swiss hog-packer of as humble origin as Amzi Hooper and of less than one-fifth his wealth. The family longed to possess a genuine nobleman, and Jane, a devourer of the English novels which are written by the middle classes for the middle classes about the upper classes—seemed to be in sympathy with her father’s and mother’s ambition and keenly eager to become a “real lady.” It was assumed by her set that Frothingham had come for her—the newspapers hinted as much several times each week.
But Frothingham, grown extraordinarily sensitive, shied at the amazing high heels on which she tottered like a cripple, at the skin-like fit of her clothes, at the suspicious brilliance of her cheeks and blackness of her brows and lashes. Whenever she spoke to him suddenly in her shrill dialect he felt as if a file had been drawn across his pneumogastric nerve. And she constantly used a slang expression which seemed to him—in her—the essence of vulgarity. She could not speak ten sentences without saying that she or somebody or everybody had nearly or quite “thrown a fit.”
It struck him as a biting irony of fate that the woman whom of all he knew well in America he least approved should be the one who was frankly throwing herself at his head in his hour of desperation. When he learned that her father was an Englishman born and bred in the “lower middle class,” he felt that he had solved the problem of the family’s over-eagerness to get him. “That’s why the old beggar almost cringes as he talks to me,” he said to himself.
“D——n their impudence!” And the next time he met Hooper he treated him not as an American and an equal, but as an Englishman and an inferior. And Amzi at once fell into his “place,” just as a car horse, though elevated to be a coach horse, will halt at one ring of a bell. “It’s in the blood,” thought Frothingham. “It can’t be hid or got out.” But—he didn’t venture the experiment with the daughter.
The climax came one morning when he met her by chance in the Lake Park Drive. She was perched high on a red and black dog-cart in which she was driving a bay and a gray tandem. Her hat was the biggest he had seen her wear, and she was swathed in a silver-grey dust-coat with a red embroidered collar. She stopped and invited him to join her.