Adams on his side and Maxine on hers did not in the least contemplate possibilities. A social river, wide as the Congo, and flowing from as mysterious a source, lay between them. Maxine was rich—so rich that the contrast of her wealth with his own poverty shut the door for Adams on the idea of marriage. He could not hope to take his true place in the world for years, and he would not stoop to take a woman’s money or assistance.
He was too big to go through a back door. No, he would enter the social temple by walking between the pillars of the portico, or smashing an entrance way through the wall with his fist.
He was a type of the true American man, the individual who trusts in himself; an unpleasant person very often, but the most essentially male creation in Nature.
Though he could not contemplate Maxine as a wife, he did as a woman. In a state of savagery he would have carried her off in his arms; surrounded as he was by the trammels of civilization, he contented himself with imagining her in that position.
It is quite possible that no other woman would ever inspire the same passion in him. He knew this, yet he did not grumble; for he was practical, and his practical nature had a part in his wildest dreams.
Go to New York and look at the twenty-storied, sky-scrapers built by the Adamses. They look like houses out of a story by Dean Swift. The wildest dreams of architecture. Yet they don’t fall down; they serve their purpose, for the dreamers who built them were at bottom practical men.
As he paced the deck, smoking and contemplating the moonlit river, Maxine gave place in his mind to her father.
Berselius up to this had shown himself in no unfavourable light. Up to this he had been almost companionable.
Almost! They had dined together, paced the deck together, discussed all sorts of subjects, yet not by the fraction of an inch had he advanced in his knowledge of the man. A wall of ice divided Berselius from his fellow-men. Between him and them a great gulf was fixed, a gulf narrow enough to speak across, but of an impenetrable depth. Berselius was always so assured, so impassively calm, so authoritative, his conversation so penetrative, so lit by intuition and acquired knowledge, that Adams sometimes in his company felt that elation which comes to us when we find ourselves in the presence of a supreme mind. At other times this overpowering personality weighed upon him so much that he would leave the saloon and pace the deck so as to become himself again.