ysical soreness, like that of a new bruise, attacked my heart, and
rising hastily from the table, I made some hurried apology and went out,
leaving them alone together. Glancing back as I got into my overcoat in
the hall, I saw that Sally still held the spray of sweet alyssum to her
lips, and that the look George bent on her was transfigured by the
tenderness that flooded his face with colour. She loved me, she was
mine, and yet at this instant she had turned to another man for a keener
comprehension, a subtler sympathy, than I could give. A passion, not of
jealousy, but of hurt pride, throbbed in my heart, and by some curious
eccentricity of emotion, this pride was associated with a rush of
ambition, with the impelling desire to succeed to the fullest in the
things in which success was possible. If I could not give what George
gave, I would give, I told myself passionately, something far better.
When the struggle came closer between the class and the individual, I
had little doubt that the claims of tradition would yield as they had
always done to the possession of power. Only let that power find its
fullest expression, and I should stand to George Bolingbroke as the
living present of action stands to the dead past of history. After all,
what I had to give was my own, hewn by my own strength out of life,
while the thing in which he excelled was merely a web of delicate fibre
woven by generations of hands that had long since crumbled to dust.
Triumph over him, I resolved that I would in the end, and the way to
triumph led, I knew, through a future of outward achievement to the
dazzling presidency of the South Midland and Atlantic Railroad.

As time went on this passionate ambition, which was so closely bound up
with my love for Sally, absorbed me even to the exclusion of the feeling
from which it had drawn its greatest strength. The responsibilities of
my position, the partial control of the large sums of money that passed
through my hands, crowded my days with schemes and anxieties, and kept
me tossing, sleepless yet with wearied brain, through many a night. For
pleasure I had no time; Sally I saw only for a hurried or an
absent-minded hour or two at meals, or when I came up too tired to think
or to talk in the evenings. Often I fell asleep over my cigar after
dinner, while she dressed and hastened, with her wreathed head and bare
shoulders, to a reception or a ball. A third of my time was spent in New
York, and during