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When Isabelle entered the dining room, the head waiter placed her in a sheltered nook behind one of the stucco pillars, not far from the stringed instruments concealed in a little Gothic choir loft over the entrance. There were flowers on the tables and multitudinous electric candles in pink silk shades. The open-timbered ceiling had been decorated by an artist of some fame, who had sought in vain to give to this rich feeding place of the herd the grace of an Italian palace. Two long mural paintings adorned the end walls, and six highly colored tapestries were hung at equal spaces laterally. In spite of the large proportions of the room, it was insufferably hot and heavy with the odors of wilting flowers and perspiring humanity, somewhat perfumed, and of foods and wines. The early diners were leaving for the theatres and opera, the women trailing their rich gowns over the rugged floor as they stared about them. (They were mostly strangers from inland cities who had been attracted by the fame of this newest hotel.) Their places were quickly taken by others in couples and in parties, and the hum of talk was feebly punctuated by occasional bursts of teasing sound from the stringed instruments. Isabelle felt curiously alone, sitting here in the crowded dining room,—alone as she had not felt on the most solitary hillside of Grosvenor. She closed her eyes and saw the village in its cup among the mountains glittering white in the March sun. The thin, pure air of the forests filled her nostrils. She was homesick—for the first time in her life! With a little shake she roused herself and turned to Fosdick's article that she had brought with her to the table. It was all about the progress of the socialist parties abroad, their aims and accomplishments, showing first-hand observation and knowledge; also a vivaciously critical spirit,—in short what Gossom would call "a smart article." … There was another "serious" article on the problem of housing the poor, amply illustrated. In the newspapers that she had glanced through on her long journey, there had been likewise much about "movements," political and social, speeches and societies organized to promote this interest or that, and endless references to the eternal conflict of capital and labor, in the struggle for their respective shares of the human cake. It was the same with all the more serious magazines at the news-stand; they were filled with discussion of "movements" for the betterment of humanity, of talk about this means or that to make the world run a little more smoothly. It was proof, according to the editors, of the sound spirit of democracy, fighting for ideals, making progress along right lines. In other days Isabelle would have considered Fosdick's article brilliant, if not profound. She would have felt that here was something very important for serious people to know, and believed she was thinking…. To-night Fosdick's phrases seemed dead, like this hotel life, this hotel reading matter. Even the impassioned editorial she had seen on child-labor laws, and the article on factory inspection, and the bill to regulate the hours of labor on railroads—all the "uplift" movements—seemed dead, wooden,—part of the futile machinery with which earnest people deluded themselves that they were doing something. Would all of them, even if successful, right the wrong of life in any deep sense? …
Isabelle laid down the magazine and looked over the room again. Her eyes fell on a party of four at one of the tables in front of her, beneath the mural painting. While the food she had ordered was being slowly put before her, she watched them. There seemed something familiar about the black back of the man at the nearer side of the table, about the way he leaned forward, gesticulating from his wrists, and also about the large woman at his right with her head turned away. After a time this head came around and looked down the room. It was Conny! Conny splendidly blond and large, in half-mourning, with a fresh touch of color on her pale face, her beautiful shoulders quite bare. And that full mouth and competent chin,—no one but Conny! Isabelle hastily looked down at her plate. She had not recognized the others at the table. Conny was seated just beneath the pink and white painting representing spring,—a mixture of Botticelli brought to date and Puvis. And Conny carried on the allegory of Flora into full-blown summer. She was drinking her wine meditatively, and her firm chin—the Senator had said it was moulded for an empress—was slightly tilted, revealing the thick, muscular neck.
So long ago it was when Isabelle had been thrilled by her luncheon at the Woodyards'. She hurried her dinner now to escape the necessity of talking to Conny when her party passed out. But as she prepared to rise, she saw that they were coming towards her and sat down again, opening the magazine. From it she could see them, Conny in the lead sweeping forward in that consciously unconscious manner with which she took her world. The man behind her had some trouble in keeping up with her pace; he limped, and almost tripped on Conny's train. Isabelle saw him out of her lowered eyelids. It was Tom Cairy. They almost brushed her table as they passed, Conny and after her Tom. Conny was drawling in her treble note, "She made a great sensation in Herndon's piece over in London." … And Isabelle was conscious that she was sitting alone at the hotel table, staring into vacancy, with a waiter impatiently eying the coin in her hand….
She had looked at him for half an hour, not knowing him! And suddenly she saw how dead it all was: not merely her feeling for Cairy, but her whole past, the petty things clone or felt by that petty other self, ending with the tragic fact of Vickers's sacrifice. She had passed through into another world…. This man who had sat there near her all the evening she had once believed that she loved more than life itself,—his mere voice had made her tremble,—this God she had created to worship! And she had not recognized him.
High up in her corner of the brick and stone cliff above the twinkling city, Isabelle knelt by the open window, looking out into the foggy night. Unconscious of the city sounds rising in one roar from the pavement,—the voice of the giant metropolis,—she knelt there thinking of that dead past, that dead self, and of Vickers, a solemn unearthly music like the march of life in her ears. She knelt there, wide-eyed, able to see it all calmly, something like prayer struggling upwards in her heart for expression.
CHAPTER LXIX
All night long in the corridors of the cliff-city the elevator doors had clicked, as they were opened and shut on the ceaseless trips to pack away the people in the eighteen stories. In the morning they became even livelier in their effort to take down the hungry guests for breakfast and the day's business. The corridors and the lobbies and the foyer were thronged with the same people, freshly dressed for the day, fat or lean, heavy eyed or alert, pale, nervous, with quick tones and jerky movements. And there was a line of new arrivals before a fresh row of pale clerks. The prominent people of the city, especially the women, had already left town for the Springs or Florida or Paris or the Mediterranean, anywhere but here! Their flitting, however, had made no impression on the hotels or the honey-hives along the avenue. What they abandoned—the city in March with its theatres, opera, restaurants, and shops—the provincials came hungrily to suck. For the cast-off, the spurned, is always Somebody's desired.
It was the same on the other side of the ferry in the railroad terminal, hurrying throngs pressing through the little wickets that bore the legend of the destination of each train,—"The Florida East Coast Limited," "New Orleans, Texas, and the South," "Washington and Virginia," etc. From this centre the strands of travel ran outwards to many beguiling points. And there were two perpetual motions,—the crowd flowing out to some joy beyond the horizon, and the crowd flowing back irresistibly to the sucking whirlpool. Always movement, change, endless going, going with these people,—the spirit of the race in their restless feet! There was always the Desirable beyond at the other end of the line. All the world that could move was in unstable flux, scurrying hither and thither in hot search for the phantom Better—change, variety—to be had for the price of a ticket.
It was a relief to be on the Pullman, seated for a time in a small fixed space, free from the revolving whirlpool of restless humanity, though that fixity itself was being whirled across the land. With a sigh Isabelle leaned back and looked at the passing country outside. The snow had long disappeared, leaving the brown earth naked and forlorn. It was the same landscape, under similar conditions, that Isabelle had gazed at the spring afternoon when she was hurrying back to meet Cairy, his violets on her breast. It seemed to her then that she was happy, with a wonderful happiness. Now she was content…. As the train rushed through the Alleghanies, the first faint touches of spring appeared in the swelling stems of the underbrush, in the full streams of yellow water, and the few spears of green grass beside the sheltering fence posts, and the soft misty atmosphere full of brooding changes over the level fields.