It is no easy task to describe Bruce Decker’s feelings, as he stood in the middle of the pavement on Fifth Avenue, and watched the retreating form of the young girl, whose friendship he had once prized so highly. His cheeks grew redder and redder, as he thought of the glance she had given him, and the insolence of her manner. Then he glanced down on his clothes, and his hands reddened and hardened with toil, and said to himself, “Well, I suppose I’m not stylish enough to suit her now that she’s been across the water, and mixed up with all sorts of foreign people.” It seemed very hard to the boy, however, that he should be despised just because he did not wear fashionable clothes, and he said to himself with some bitterness of spirit, “I suppose I could rig myself up in fine style for less than a hundred dollars, and be as good a dude as any of them.”
It was with this feeling in his heart that he walked slowly away, and then—for his brain did not stop working merely because of some trifling rebuff—it occurred to him that if there was only a hundred dollars difference between him and a dude, the obstacle was not an impossible one to surmount, and that a few years of hard work would convert him into a very superior quality of dude, and would thus enable him to regain the friendship and esteem which he was positive Miss Van Kuren once entertained for him. With this cheerful view of the case he lifted his head bravely, and walked on toward the truck quarters with swift and resolute steps. He said nothing to his friend Charles Weyman in regard to his chance meeting. In fact, he did all he could to forget it himself, but he had been too deeply wounded to put all recollection of the young girl’s coldness to him aside, and the memory of that chance meeting rankled in his breast for many weeks.
One cold, dreary, windy evening, the tall, dark, bearded man left the office on the East side, where he was known as “Scar-faced Charlie,” and turned his face in the direction of the fine mansion in the upper part of the city, where he was known to the servants, the tradespeople, and a few of the neighbors as “Samuel Dexter,” a relative of the kindly old gentleman who owned the house. Passing through the broad gate and along the winding road, he emerged into an open space in front of the mansion, and saw to his surprise that lights were gleaming through the windows of the elder Mr. Dexter’s library, a room which was seldom opened during the owner’s absence.