When he began to go into society, he did not forget his earlier friends; he rather prided himself on his constancy; he thought it was uncommon, and he found it a consolation when other things failed him. It was even an amusement full of literary suggestion for him to turn from his own dream of what the world was to Hughes’s dream of what the world should be; and it flattered him that the old man should have taken the sort of fancy to him that he had. Hughes consulted him as a person with a different outlook on life, and valued him as a practical mind, akin to his own in quality, if not in direction. First and last, he read him his whole book; he stormily disputed with him about the passages which Ray criticised as to their basal facts; but he adopted some changes Ray suggested.
The young fellow was a whole gay world to Mrs. Denton, in his reproduction of his society career for her. She pursued him to the smallest details of dress and table and manner; he lived his society events over again for her with greater consciousness than he had known in their actual experience; and he suffered patiently the little splenetic resentment in which her satiety was apt finally to express itself. He decided that he must not take Mrs. Denton in any wise seriously; and he could see that Peace was grateful to him for his complaisance and forbearance. She used to listen, too, when he described the dinners and dances for her sister, and their interest gave the material a fascination for Ray himself: it emphasized the curious duality of his life, and lent the glamor of unreality to the regions where they could no more have hoped to follow him than to tread the realms of air. Sometimes their father hung about him—getting points for his morals, as Ray once accused him of doing.
“No, no!” Hughes protested. “I am interested to find how much better than their conditions men and women always are. The competitive conditions of our economic life characterize society as well as business. Yet business men and society women are all better and kinder than you would believe they could be. The system implies that the weak must always go to the wall, but in actual operation it isn’t so.”
“From Mr. Ray’s account there seem to be a good many wall-flowers,” Mrs. Denton suggested.
Hughes ignored her frivolity. “It shows what glorious beings men and women would be if they were rightly conditioned. There is a whole heaven of mercy and loving-kindness in human nature waiting to open itself: we know a little of what it may be when a man or woman rises superior to circumstance and risks a generous word or deed in a selfish world. Then for a moment we have a glimpse of the true life of the race.”
“Well, I wish I had a glimpse of the untrue life of the race, myself,” said Mrs. Denton, as her father turned away. “I would give a whole year of the millennium for a week in society.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said her husband. He had been listening in gloomy silence to Ray’s talk, and he now turned on his wife. “I would rather see you dead than in such ‘good society’ as that.”
“Oh, well,” she answered, “you’re much likelier to see me dead. If I understand Mr. Ray, it’s a great deal easier to get into heaven than to get into good society.” She went up to her husband and pushed his hair back from his eyes. “If you wore it that way, people could see what a nice forehead you’ve got. You look twice as ‘brainy,’ now, Ansel.”
He caught her hand and flung it furiously away. “Ansel,” she said, “is beginning to feel the wear and tear of the job of setting the world right as much as I do. He never had as much faith in the millennium as father has; he thinks there’s got to be some sort of sacrifice first; he hasn’t made up his mind quite what it’s to be, yet.”
Denton left them abruptly, and after a while Ray heard him talking in the next room; he thought he must be talking to some one there, till his wife said, “Ansel doesn’t say much in company, but he’s pretty sociable when he gets by himself.”