If it was a dance, the orchestra detonated the notes like cartridges from a Maxim gun; the dancers whirled or raced furiously. “Why this hurry?” he gasped to a handsome, powerful girl, who had dragged him round a ballroom twice, had flung him into a chair, and was dashing away with another man to finish the waltz.
“I’ve got to catch the train for the millennium,” she screamed back over her shoulder and disappeared in the maelstrom.
Even at the play the audience shuffled uneasily while the players sped through their lines or the orchestra rattled off the between-the-acts music; and afterward all rushed from the theatre as if it were afire. The blank expression habitual to Frothingham’s face was now less a disguise than a reflection of his internal state.
“I must get out of this,” he said to himself at the end of two weeks. “The disease may be catching. Now I understand that fellow who went from here to tear London up by the roots and put in his tuppenny tubes. A Chicagoan should be barred from a country like any other plague.” And he wrote his sister that he was “beginning to twitch with the Chicago disease.”
Evelyn had written him regularly--a letter by each Wednesday’s steamer. She had put a brave face upon their affairs, had tried to make him picture life at Beauvais House as smooth, almost happy. But he had more than suspected that a far different story ran between the lines; and when she wrote that she had engaged herself to Charley Sidney he understood.
Seven months before he would have grumbled and cursed, and would have accepted the sacrifice. Now, it roused in him a fierce protest, a feeling of abhorrence of which he would not have been capable before he visited America--and the Barneys. “She sha’n’t sell herself to that creeping cad,” he said, and on impulse he cabled: “Sidney impossible and unnecessary. You must break it. Answer.”
The answer came a few hours later: “Shall do as you wish.”
Instead of being relieved he repented his impulse, wondered where it had come from, fell into a profound depression. Seven months of stalking; nothing to show for it but three ridiculous, sickening misses. And here he was with an empty bag; and what little heart he once had for the game was gone; in its place a disgust for it and for himself. “How Nelly Barney would scorn me if she knew what a creature I am,” he said. He was now thinking a great deal on the subject of Nelly Barney’s standards for men and also on the subject of Nelly Barney as a standard for women. In neither direction did he find any encouragement. He knew her through being in the same house with her day after day, through seeing her at all hours and in all moods--and she never made the slightest attempt to conceal her real self. He felt that such a woman could not be attracted by his title, would not be likely to be attracted by himself; he felt that she was at the same time more worth the winning than any other woman he knew in America--“Yes, or in England,” he confessed at last.