He made several excursions to the country—alone. They proved abortive. He found it painful to reach the drowsy earth with his drowsy mind. And yet the earth’s call was dear, now that the buds stood hard on the hard wood. He could not respond. He could not keep from trying to respond. A strain.
There were dinners and theater-parties with Caroline Lord. But one day David found in himself the courage to decide that he detested her. That this strapping, full-blown woman should take the airs of a secluded virgin was ill enough: but that, with all her experience of life, she should display a virgin’s judgments was unbearable. Was Miss Lord perhaps trying to impress him with her endless thrumming on respectability, her hymned pæans to the moral outlook? Why should she care so much for the standards of wealth, who was forever insisting that her family had been penniless but of high social value? Either this woman was ashamed of her own intelligence and enterprise or else she thought David would like to deem her so. David was not sure. Soon he did not care. Her vigorous solicitude for the manners and customs which she assumed were theirs had an offensive note. It made David silent and reserved. It left the field to Miss Lord. So that the efficient lady preened herself and spread herself and paying no true attention to her friend had no idea of her effect upon him.
Tom laughed when he told him about her. David found that there was no difficulty in speaking to Tom about Miss Lord.
“But why should you expect something better of her?” Tom asked him.
“Well, she is capable——”
“Bosh, my dear man. Look at her straight. The only strength she has, I am convinced, is the strength of Deane and Company—a strength she sucks.” Tom had met her once. Since then, he had skillfully avoided all David’s efforts to make him join them some night at dinner. “Now tell me frankly can you imagine that lady, with her advertised virginity, her mincing mind and her stiff sense of right and wrong, careering in open battle? Don’t you see that she is something only in her position? Her substance comes from the fields whose produce she helps distribute at a profit.”
“She seems to be forever bowing to judgments like those of Aunt Lauretta.”
“Of course, since she gets her keep from the same place.”
David had many evenings alone. He found he liked them. He had never been included in more than a tithe of the whirling activities of Tom who, now, had added politics to his program. Tom was a member of Tammany Hall.
“The young men are profiting by the folly of the reformers,” was the way Tom put it. “They have learnt, Davie dear, as I hope you shall learn also, generally speaking, that you can’t win a fight without joining with your enemy. We have done with kid-glove pats at corruption. We are going to clean up the undesirable elements of the Democratic Party by first entering their stronghold. That is why we are going into Tammany.”