“Why haven’t you hit it off in Chicago?” Mrs. Wilbur inquired curiously.
“Why haven’t you?” the young man retorted. “And I like it tremendously well here. I should want to hang on merely for the pleasure of seeing your crowd thrown into the lake or banged on the head, if they don’t reform.” He tilted back and forth with suppressed merriment. “I can’t help feeling pleased over the growls from the ‘masses.’ If some of your rich friends keep on grabbing quite so shamelessly, there will be a row. I should hate to shoulder a musket in defence of your palace, Mrs. Wilbur.”
“Their selfishness is intolerable,” she said fiercely. “I feel stifled when I see them.”
“Yet many of them are very good people to see.” Her explosiveness rendered him impartial. “You are too ready to include all; there is a splendid remnant—fine men one can honestly admire. Even the selfish ones are merely crude and wrong-headed. You don’t do the place justice.”
“I can’t be just. There is no reason in my life here.” She leaned toward him appealingly, longing for sympathy. He was not merely a young man she had seen a dozen times in a fragmentary way. He was so intensely human that she felt she had always known him.
“No, not on your basis, there isn’t any reason,” Jennings admitted.
She waited for his meaning.
“The refined selfish person can’t get satisfied here.”
She looked at him inquiringly.
“You have always desired. A tremendous ego, and admirable, admirable,” he ended softly.