They had come from Omaha five years before; they were on their way to New York, where they would be due five years hence. From railroad law, Carson had grown to the business of organizing monopolies. Some of his handiworks in this order of art had been among the first to take the field. He was resting now, while the country was suffering from its prolonged fit of the blues, and his wife was organizing their social life. They had picked up a large house on the North Boulevard, a bargain ready for their needs; it had been built for the Bidwells, just before the panic.
A rapid glance over the rooms proved to Sommers that Mrs. Carson was as clever a manipulator of capitalists as her husband. There were a few of the more important people of the city, such as Alexander Hitchcock, Ferdinand Dunster, the Polot families, the Blaisdells, the Anthons. There were also a few of the more distinctly "smart" people, and a number who might be counted as social possibilities. Sommers had seen something in a superficial way of many of these people. Thanks to the Hitchcocks' introduction, and also to the receptive attitude of a society that was still very largely fluid, he had gone hither and thither pretty widely during this past year. There were quieter, less pretentious circles than this in which the Carsons aspired to move, but he had not yet found them. Anything that had a retiring disposition disappeared from sight in Chicago. Society was still a collection of heterogeneous names that appeared daily in print. As such it offered unrivalled opportunities for aspiration.
Sommers had not come to the Carsons in the fulfilment of an aspiration. Mrs. R. Gordon Carson bored him. Her fussy conscious manners bespoke too plainly the insignificant suburban society in which she had played a minor part. He came because Dr. Lindsay had told him casually that Louise Hitchcock was in town again. He arrived late, when the lecture was nearly over, and lingered in the hall on the fringe of the gathering.
Carson had some reputation for his pictures. There was one, a Sargent, a portrait of the protagonist in this little drama of success, that hung in a recess of the hall at the foot of the stairs. R. Gordon Carson, as the great psychologist had seen him, was a striking person, an embodiment of modern waywardness, an outcropping of the trivial and vulgar. In a sacque coat, with the negligent lounging air of the hotel foyer, he stared at you, this Mr. R. Gordon Carson, impudently almost, very much at his ease. Narrow head, high forehead, thin hair, large eyes, a great protruding nose, a thin chin, smooth-shaven, yet with a bristly complexion,—there he was, the man from an Iowa farm, the man from the Sioux Falls court-house, the man from Omaha, the man now fully ripe from Chicago. Here was no class, no race, nothing in order; a feature picked up here, another there, a third developed, a fourth dormant—the whole memorable but unforgivably ordinary.
Not far away, standing in the doorway of the next room, was Carson himself. The great painter had undressed him and revealed him. What a comment to hang in one's own home! The abiding impression of the portrait was self-assurance; hasty criticism would have called it conceit. All the deeper qualities of humanity were rubbed out for the sake of this one great expression of egotism.
When the lecture was finished, a little group formed about the host; he was telling his experience with the great master, a series of anecdotes that had made his way in circles where success was not enough.
"I knew he was a hard customer," Sommers overheard him saying, "and I gave him all the rope he wanted. 'It may be two years before I do anything on your portrait, Mr. Carson,' he said.
"'Take five,' I told him.
"'I shall charge five thousand.'
"'Make it ten,' said I.