Spring, that stole upon the mountains with an evanescent fragrance, and unfolding of delicate greens and shy opening blossoms, swept into the city with a blaze of life and color, with a joyous outpouring of people and bedizening of shop-windows; and nowhere else was its influence so marked as on the Avenue. Motor vehicles crowded from curb to curb, held back or permitted to sweep onward by the uplifted hands of mighty creatures in uniform, horseback and afoot, imperturbably calm, lords and rulers and receivers of tribute; the sidewalks swarmed with people, lines of men and women swinging northward and southward, some buoyantly conscious of new-fashioned raiment, their eyes apparently unaware of the jostling crowd, some with tiny dogs under their arms, some looking at the passing faces, or bowing to people in motor cars, a few glancing into the brilliant windows of the shops, a few chatting and laughing with companions.
Benson Flood, returned from Virginia the day before, was one of those who, marching northward, looked searchingly into the faces of the people he passed, and frequently glanced into the automobiles on his right. No one in all that army was more aware than he of the vivid beauty of the moving scene. For three years he had watched the Avenue burst into life and color under the recurring influence of Spring; but he had lost none of the keenness of his first perception of it, none of his delight in its unique splendor, none of the thrill of having achieved the right to be a part of it.
Achievement, indeed, was what Benson Flood stood for. Beginning life in a Western town, his subsequent history was one of those spectacular dramas common enough in American progress, yet always thrilling in their exhibition of daring and courage, in their apparent forcing of opportunity, their making and taking of chances, their final conquest of power and wealth. Flood's career differed from many another only in two particulars: as early as the age of forty he had reached that point where he could afford to lay aside his more public pursuits; and at the same time, perhaps because he had grown no older in the cult, the mere accumulation of wealth ceased to be the first object in life for him. He was the offspring of one of the curious mixtures of race that distinguish America; and doubtless from some ancestor of an older civilization he inherited a taste and longing for that to which, in his youth and early manhood, he had been an absolute stranger. When he left his West behind him, he faced towards those gentler things which, in his fine imagination and the perception trained by the exigencies of his career, he felt to be more desirable than anything he had yet attained to. Certainly they had become to him, untasted though they were at the time, of greater importance. He valued his experiences, his labors, his millions; but they were not enough. However unaccustomed to it he might be, he knew very definitely what he now wanted; and a winter in New York, with a year or two in Europe, had put him in a fair way of adding the fulfillment of his later ambition to his earlier achievements. A race-winning yacht, a few introductions among people who welcome the owners of mines and large fortunes, these gave a social background which, with the excellent foundation of his millions, served very well in New York, and taught him much about those things which he was now so sure of wanting. It was not strange that he believed them to be summed up, embodied, realized to the utmost, in one woman.
He was looking for her as he walked up the Avenue on this April afternoon; she loved its life and color and change, and was apt to pass over some part of it as often as she could. So Flood watched the passing women for the face that could so magically quicken his pulses. Many sought his recognition, yet he was oblivious of their number, ignoring the various half-invitations that were tentatively made him—the leaning forward of one in a limousine, the slight pause or lingering look of another.
His thoughts were still full of his journey, and Spring on the Avenue only brought up memories—so lately realities—of the breath of the woods, the wind in the tree-tops, the brown and green of fields so lately seen; and Flood had reached that state of mind where all that was sweet in memory, all that was beautiful in the present, all that he desired from the future, only reminded him of the one woman.
Several times, through the crowd, he thought he saw her, and went more quickly forward; but as often he fell back, disappointed. Suddenly, in answer to a firm grasp on his arm, he turned.
"Ah, Marshall!" he said, not too enthusiastically.
"I say, Benny, is it a wager? You're stalking up the Avenue without a word or a look for anybody, trampling on people, mowing them down by the thousand like a Juggernaut from the West! That's how I traced you, by the bodies strewn in your path."
Flood was always amused by Pendleton's nonsense; yet now he smiled and said nothing. To-day it was not Pendleton he wanted to see. The other seemed to divine this.
"You don't seem very sociable," he remarked. "Did your lone trip to Virginia give you a confirmed taste for solitude?"