Sylvia listened in bewilderment. “Surely, Frank,” she exclaimed, “there must be some friendliness——”
He smiled. “Just as I said, honey—you’re judging by the South. We’ve snobbery enough there, God knows—but some of us are kind-hearted. You can’t imagine things up here—how cold and formal people are. They have their millions of dollars and the social position this gives them; they are jealous of those who have more and suspicious of those who have less—and they’ve been that way for so long that every plain human feeling is dead in them. Take a man like Douglas van Tuiver, for example. You’ve heard of him, I suppose?”
“I’ve heard of the van Tuivers, of course.”
“Well, Douglas is our bright particular social star just now. He’s inherited from three estates already—the Lord only knows how many tens of millions in his own right. He’s gone the ‘Gold Coast’ crowd one better—has his own private house here in Cambridge, and an apartment in Boston also, I’m told. He entered society there at the same time that he entered college; and he doesn’t think much of our social life—except the little set he’d already met in Boston and New York. He’s stiff and serious as a chief justice—self-conscious, condescending——”
“Do you know him?” asked Sylvia.
“I never met him, of course; but I see him all the time, because he’s in some of my sections.”
“In some of your sections!” cried Sylvia. “And you never met him?”
The other laughed. “You see, honey,” he said, “how little you are able to imagine life at Harvard! Douglas, my dear, has been yachting with English peers; he has Scotch earls for ancestors, and an accent that he has acquired in their honor. He sets more store by them, I suppose, than he does by his old Knickerbocker ancestors, who left him several farms between Fifth and Madison Avenues.”
“Is he a club man?” asked Sylvia.
“He lives to set the social standards for our clubs; a sort of arbiter elegantiarum. It’s one of the sayings they attribute to him, that he came to Harvard because American university life was in need of ‘tone.’”