The windows of The Worthy had held an especial fascination. It wasn’t altogether the care-free college singing, the Mardi-Gras spirit, the esprit de corps among all college men in town that night. It was a sense of his own inability to attain to what these things stood for without hurting some one to do it. He would have liked to be dining in such a place, across a snowy table from a beautifully gowned woman,—like it very, very much. But probably the fellow whom he had watched with that princess in black tulle thought nothing of it. That was his life. He placed no value on the delights of high-caste living because he had never known anything else. He disclosed it by his poise and easy familiarity with his environment, his graceful behavior and carriage in juxtaposition to his charming companion. Economists and peanut politicians might rail that America has no classes or castes. What a mockery! Between the lowly-born and the purple must ever exist a gulf as wide as the planets. It was not something to be attained: it was a heritage. At least he believed so.
Nathan went to his hotel down near the railroad arch and tried to get solace from a cigar. It was a very expensive cigar. It had cost him thirty-five cents. But it was Job’s comfort. He might make a fortune, he might buy clothes that cost thousands and smoke thirty-five-cent cigars by the bale, but that would never give the provincial the easy grace and the utter lack of self-consciousness displayed by that fellow and girl outlined in the Wonder Window. For it was a Wonder Window to poor Nathan. It opened in a Castle Wall where the tatterdemalion crowd passed underneath to wend their clodhopper turkey tracks to mud huts out on the edge of the moor.
“And I suppose, if dad had only been minded that way, I might have worked my way through college and been in such a place with a crowd of revelers and such a woman across from me to-night,” he said bitterly. “Yet my problem is how to overcome that handicap now. How can I? What must I do? Some one ought to write a book on how to climb out of mediocrity and Be Somebody!”
Be Somebody! That was Milly’s code now. But what a mess she was making of it! Some one ought to write a book to help women to be somebody, also. Hang it all, what was the matter with life, anyhow? Where in it all was the great constructive purpose?
Nathan never forgot that night in Springfield when all unwittingly he had beheld Madelaine Theddon above him in the hotel window. Not because he had seen Madelaine and remembered her, but because of the events which followed swiftly.
He had just retired to bed and pushed the button extinguishing his lamp, to lie and ponder on the problem of how he could Be Somebody, when two sharp taps came at his door. He arose and opened it a crack.
“Telegram, sir!” said the lad outside.
Nathan reached for his vest and gave the boy ten cents. Then he sank down on the edge of his bed and tore the end of the flimsy yellow envelope.
COME AT ONCE URGENT ACCIDENT MILDRED
Nathan tried to get his home in Paris on the long-distance. There had been a bad thunderstorm above Brattleboro and the wires were down. He arose and dressed but could not get a train to take him through to White River Junction before six-thirty in the morning.