Is life sweet? No. Then let Davy's path be followed. Now, therefore, let this affair of suicide be discussed.
Can David Lockwin, the people's idol, commit suicide? Does he desire to pay the full earthly penalty of that act? He is of first-class family. There has never been a suicide in the records.
His self-slaughter will be the first scandal in his strain.
He is happily married, so far as this world knows. If he be bored with the presence of Esther he alone possesses that secret. She does not. He is the husband of a lady to whom there will some day come an added fortune which will make her the richest woman in the West.
He is the reliance of the party. He is the one orator who remains unanswered in joint debate. Quackery as it is, no opponent dares to cross the path of David Lockwin. It is a common saying that to give an opponent a date with Lockwin is to foretell the serious illness of the opponent. It is a sham--this oratory--but it befools the city.
Can the fashionable church to which Esther belongs sustain the shock of Lockwin's suicide? Behold the funeral of such a wight, once the particular credit of the congregation, now the particular disgrace!
That forthcoming contest with Corkey!
Is it not uncomfortable? What is it Corkey is saying? Oh! yes, Corkey, to be sure! "Mr. Corkey, I should have told you they will do nothing. You must contest."
Here, therefore, are two men who are plunged into the deepest seethings of mental action. The one has missed greatness by the distance of a mere hand's grasp; the other is half crazed to find himself so fatally conspicuous in society.
Let the rich, respectable, beloved, ambitious and eloquent Lockwin hurry back to that problem: What to do when he shall arrive in Chicago?