“Haven’t you dressed yet?,” asked Grant anxiously. “The automobile’s at the door.”
Instead of thinking about his speech, Eric was only brooding over the hollowness of his belated, unwanted triumph; three years earlier it would have intoxicated him to take New York or London by storm, but he was wondering for the first time whether this lust for theatrical sensationalism did not really lower him to the level of Barbara Neave and her school. Certainly he had outgrown the phase so much that he would have been almost a little glad to shew his contempt by making every one wait....
For a moment he pretended to be unconscious of Grant’s presence; then he was stung to activity by a fear that this scorn of soul was only another experiment in sensationalism....
“I’ll be ready in ten minutes,” he cried, as he ran out of the winter garden. For one night he must enter into the spirit of his company; after that he would hide himself where he could escape equally the emotion of courting triumph and of avoiding it.
Hundreds were assembled at the Plaza, when he arrived: how many hundreds he was too indifferent to enquire, but they were lined up in rows; the rumble of countless conversations shrank to a whisper and died away in a moment’s silence; then every one who knew him hastened to shake hands, while the rest begged to be introduced. For all his indifference, Eric was warmed by his reception. Throughout his wanderings in South America and Japan, imagination and will had swung alternate hammers to fashion a new life which he could find worth living. Here was acclamation. The throne awaited him, if he could mount it worthily. He was but thirty-five, his health had returned to him... All his life he had prayed for this moment of domination....
A waiter interrupted the chorus of welcome by thrusting his way forward with a tray of cocktails and caviare sandwiches. In the moment’s lull Eric saw Carstairs at his elbow and turned to him.
“I believe we have met,” he said, holding out his hand. “I just missed you when I called at the Embassy last year.”
Carstairs shook hands awkwardly and muttered an introduction to his wife.
“When I was in Japan, I saw that Barbara had married my friend George Oakleigh,” Eric went on. “I know them both very well. Jim Loring, of course, was one of my greatest friends. And your mother used to be kind enough to ask me to some of her parties.”
He had dropped his indifference in a calculated effort to shew these Carstairs that, even if they did not want to meet him, he would meet them or not as he liked. This dinner, after all, was his apotheosis; some one at his elbow was whispering that five hundred tickets had been sold and that the committee could have sold more than twice that number. It was astonishing that a thousand educated men and women had no better use for their time and money; astonishing, too, that he had allowed himself to be dragged out for public display, for in all that vast gathering there was not one eager face that he wished ever to see again. Indifference and aloofness returned as a protection against such a sense of loneliness as he had never known when he was most isolated.