Harold went down the steps to avoid the elevator. The next place was oppressive with its grandeur. A tremendous wall, cold and dark (except for a single row of lighted windows), loomed high overhead. In the center of an arched opening in this wall a white hot globe flamed, lighting into still more dazzling cleanliness a broad flight of marble steps which led by a half turn to unknown regions above. Young people were crowding into the elevator, girls in dainty costumes predominating. They seemed wondrously flowerlike and birdlike to the plainsman, and brought back his school days at the seminary, and the time when he was at ease with young people like this. He had gone far from them now—their happy faces made him sad.
He walked up the stairway, four flights, and came to a long hall, which rustled and rippled and sparkled with flights of young girls—eager, vivid, excited, and care-free. A few men moved about like dull-coated robins surrounded by orioles and canary birds.
A bland old man with clean-shaven mouth seemed to be the proper source of information, and to him Harold stepped with his question.
The old man smiled. "Miss Yardwell? Yes—she is one of our most valued pupils. Certainly—Willy!" he called to a small boy who carried a livery of startling newness, "go tell Miss Yardwell a gentleman would like to see her."
"I suppose you are from her country home?" said the old gentleman, who imagined a romance in this relation of a powerful and handsome young man to Miss Yardwell.
"I am," Harold replied briefly.
"Take a seat—she will be here presently."
Harold took the offered seat with a sick, faint feeling at the pit of his stomach. The long-hoped-for event was at hand. It seemed impossible that Mary could be there—that she was about to stand before him. His mind was filled with the things he had arranged to say to her, but they were now in confused mass, circling and circling like the wrack of a boat in a river's whirlpool.
He knew her far down the hall—he recognized the poise of her head and her walk, which had always been very fine and dignified. As she approached, the radiance of her dress, her beauty, scared him. She looked at him once and then at the clerk as if to say, "Is this the man?"
Then Harold arose and said, "Well, Mary, here I am."