CHAPTER III
THE COMPETENCIES OF MISS DELAWARE
I
Two-thirds of the inhabitants of this world live in that unreal atmosphere best described by the vulgar word of "bluff." About one-half the other third know that fact. The first two-thirds, not being able to determine which that latter half may be, exist in continual fear that they may guess wrongly in these vulgar fractions, and so make pretense where pretense is of no avail. Shoddy fears nothing so much as what vulgarly is called "the real thing;" but the trouble with shoddy, the anxiety, nay, the agony of shoddy, bluff, pretense, insincerity, whatever you care to call it, lies largely in the fact that shoddy can not always tell when it has been discovered to be shoddy.
There did not lack times in John Rawn's social life when he felt a very considerable trepidation regarding himself. He often looked at the tall mansion houses which he passed on his daily journey to and from his home, and wondered whether the occupants of some of them did not live a life of which he was ignorant. He wondered if, after all, there might not be something money could not buy.
For instance, in regard to those collector's pieces of which he had heard. How could they be distinguished from other and less preferred articles of furnishing? Since he and his wife lacked judgment in such matters, what was the remedy? How could he set matters right without discovering his own ignorance? He was like an Indian, ashamed to learn.
II
Mr. Rawn was in an unusually abject mental state, one morning, some months after he had taken charge of the headquarters offices of the International Power Company. It was not often he had much recourse to spleen-venting beyond that of the disgruntled man, who most frequently takes it out on the minor office force. By this time he had learned his battery of buttons, and now he pressed one after the other, in order that he might express to the entire personnel of the office staff his personal belief of their unfitness to exist, let alone to execute business duties in a concern such as this.
He reserved one button for the last—the one farthest to the right upon his glass-topped desk. He knew what pressure upon that button would bring, and he felt a curious shrinking, a timidity, when he reflected upon that fact. He knew he could cause to stand before him a vision of calm, cool and somewhat superior femininity. In a few short months Mr. Rawn had learned to trust, to respect and to dread his assistant, Miss Virginia Delaware. In fact, it occurred to him at this very moment that she might perhaps be one of that half of the other third who can distinguish between pretense and the actual, between shoddy and the valid article.
Yet though this thought gave him a manner of chill, there was with it an attendant thought which caused him to glow with the joy of power. By simply dropping his finger, he, John Rawn, could summon into his presence the figure of a beautiful young woman—a woman not yet grown old and gray; a woman of personal charm; a woman calm, cool and superior. He stretched his own large limbs, glanced at his rugged frame, his somewhat lined face in the glass of the cloak-room door. He looked upon himself and saw that he was good; as God looked upon the world when He made it. He was of belief that a little gray hair at the temples was no such bar after all in a man's appearance.
III