Never had Bivens's offer seemed more generous and wonderful. His pulse beat with quickened stroke as he felt the new sense of power with which he would look out on the world as a possible millionaire.
He gazed over the old Square with a feeling of regret at the thought of leaving it. He had grown to love the place in the past years of loneliness. He had become personally acquainted with every tree and shrub and every limb of the nearby trees. He had watched them grow from his window, seen them sway in the storm, bow beneath the ice, and grow into new beauty and life each spring. He was deciding too soon, perhaps. There were some features of Bivens's business he must understand more clearly before he could give up his freedom and devote himself body and soul to the task of money-making as his associate.
He resolved to make his decision with deliberation. But if he should go in for money, he wouldn't forget his old friends, nor would he leave Washington Square. He would buy that corner plot on Fifth Avenue across the way for his house. There should be two beautiful suites in it for the doctor and Harriet, and from their windows they could always see the old home on the other side. He would buy the two adjoining houses, turn them into a sanitarium, endow it and place the doctor in charge. And he would give him a fund of ten thousand a year for his outside work among the poor.
He woke from his reverie with a start and looked at his watch to find he had been standing there dreaming for half an hour. He hurried across the Square to take a cab at the Brevoort.
His mood was buoyant. He was looking out on life once more through rose-tinted glasses. At Eighth Street he met at right angles the swarming thousands hurrying across town from their work—heavy looking men who tramped with tired step, striking the pavements dully with their nailed shoes, tired anxious women, frouzle-headed little girls, sad-eyed boys half-awake—all hurrying, the fear of want and the horror of charity in their silent faces. And yet the sight touched no responsive chord of sympathy in Stuart's heart as it often had. To-night he saw only the thing that is and felt that it was good.
He pushed his way through the shabby throng, found a cab, sprang in and gave his order to the driver. A row of taxicabs stood by the curb. He took an old-fashioned hansom from choice. It seemed to link the present moment of his life to the memory of some wonderful hours he had spent, with Nan by his side, years ago.
As the cab whirled up Fifth Avenue he leaned back in his seat with a feeling of glowing satisfaction with himself and the world. The shadows of a beautiful spring night slowly deepened as the city drew her shining mantle of light about her proud form. The Avenue flashed with swift silent automobiles and blooded horses. These uptown crowds through whose rushing streams he passed were all well dressed and carried bundles of candy, flowers and toys. The newsboys were already crying extras with glowing advance accounts of the banquet and ball.
Stuart felt the contagious enthusiasm of thousands of prosperous men and women whose lives at the moment flowed about and enveloped his own. This was a pretty fine old world after all, and New York the only town worth living in.
And what was it that made the difference between the squalid atmosphere below Fourth Street and the glowing, flashing, radiant, jewelled world up-town? Money! It meant purple and fine linen, delicacies of food and drink, pulsing machines that could make a mile a minute, high-stepping horses and high-bred dogs, music and dancing, joy and laughter, sport and adventure, the mountain and the sea, freedom from care, fear, drudgery and slavery!
After all in this modern passion for money might there not be something deeper than mere greed; perhaps the regenerating power of the spirit pressing man upward? Certainly he could only see the bright side of it to-night and the wonder grew on him that he had lived for twenty-five years in a fog of sentiment and ignored deliberately the biggest fact of the century, while the simpler mind of the poor white boy in Bivens had grasped the truth at once and built his life squarely on it from the beginning. Well, he had set his mind to it at last in time to reach the highest goal of success, if he so willed. For that he was thankful.