r women, practicing a certain art in the
refinement of their vices.

The uncouth, sunburned orchard-girls inspired him with revulsion as if
they had been women of another race, creatures of an inferior genus. The
young ladies of the city seemed to him peasants in disguise, with the
narrow, selfish, stingy instincts of their parents. They knew the exact
market price of oranges and just how much land was owned by each
aspirant to their hand; and they adjusted their love to the wealth of
the pretender, believing it the test of quality to appear implacable
toward everything not fashioned to the mould of their petty life of
prejudice and tradition.

For that reason he was deeply bored by his colorless, humdrum existence,
so far removed from that other purely imaginative life which rose from
the pages of his books and enveloped him with an exotic, exciting
perfume.

Some day he would be free, and take flight on his own wings; and that
day of liberation would come when he got to be deputy. He waited for his
coming of age much as an heir-apparent waits for the moment of his
coronation.

From early boyhood he had been taught to look forward to the great event
which would cut his life in two, opening out new pathways for a "forward
march" to fame and fortune.

"When my little boy gets to be deputy," his mother would say in her rare
moments of affectionate expansiveness, "the girls will fight for him
because he is so handsome! And he'll marry a millionairess!"

Meanwhile, in long years of impatient anticipation, his life went on,
with no special circumstance to break its dull monotony--the life of an
aspirant certain of his lot, "killing time" till the call should come
to enter on his heritage. He was like those noble youngsters of bygone
centuries who, graced in their cradles by the rank of colonel from the
monarch, played around with hoop and top till they were old enough to
join their regiments. He had been born a deputy, and a deputy he was
sure to be: for the moment, he was waiting for his cue in the wings of
the theatre of life.

His trip to Italy on a pilgrimage to see the Pope was the one event that
had disturbed the dreary course of his existence. But in that country of
marvels, with a pious canon for a guide, he visited churches rather than
museums. Of theatres he saw only two--larks permitted by his tutor,
whose austerity was somewhat mollified in those changing scenes.
Indifferently they passed the famous arti