ty of New York. There was literally no human
being out of earth's millions to give him the line that would pass him
through those open invincible portals. Had he been a baboon from Central
Africa, his chances would have been better; he would have compelled
their attention for a moment.
There were heavy _portieres_ over his door; no one could hear his
groans, and he afforded himself that measure of relief. The tears ran
down his cheeks; he twisted his strong hands together. Those whose
hearts have been convulsed by the bitterness of love, by the loss of
children, by the downfall of great hopes, may read with scorn this
suffering of a snob. It may seem a mean and trivial emotion. But he has
had scant opportunity to study his kind who knows nothing of the power
of the snob to suffer. An artist may toil on unrecognized, yet with the
deep delight of his art as compensation. A man in public life may be
stung with a thousand bitter defeats, but he has the joy of the fight,
the self-respect of legitimate ambition. But for the repeated defeats of
even the successful snob, what compensation? Step by step he climbs, to
find another still to mount, each bristling with obstacles, to which he
yields the shreds and patches of his self-respect. The bitter knowledge
that he is on tolerance is ever with him--that no matter how high he
rises, he can never reach his goal, for at the goal are only those who
have never known the need to strive. 'Tis a constant battle for a
soap-bubble, an ambition without soul.
And Andrew? He had not even planted his foot on the first step. For five
years he had lived in a fool's paradise, a corroding dream. There was
literally nothing else on earth that he wanted. His money had come to
him as the very irony of Fate. It could not give him the one thing he
wished, and he had no other use for it. His dream was over. He felt like
an aged man set free from an asylum for the demented after a period of
incarceration which had devoured the good years of his life. He looked
at what still seemed wealth to him as such a man would look at all the
joys of light and liberty and taste, offered to his paralyzed senses.
When the sun rose it shone down with an air of personal sympathy upon
the fleet of white yachts in the bay, upon the grand old avenues, upon
the relics of an historic past no cottager ever thinks of, upon the
splendid houses of those who have made Newport's younger fame. And it
straggled through one pai
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