gressmen and ex-governors, state treasurers,
collectors of the port, mill owners, and bankers to whom he referred,
as the French say, in terms of their "little" names. He dwelt on the
magnificence of the huge hotel set on the borders of a lake like an
inland sea, and related such portions of the festivities incidental to
"the seeing of Chicago" as would bear repetition. No women belonged
to this realm; no women, at least, who were to be regarded as persons.
Ditmar did not mention them, but no doubt they existed, along with the
cigars and the White Seal champagne, contributing to the amenities. And
the excursion, to Janet, took on the complexion of a sort of glorified
picnic in the course of which, incidentally, a President of the United
States had been chosen. In her innocence she had believed the voters to
perform this function. Ditmar laughed.

"Do you suppose we're going to let the mob run this country?" he
inquired. "Once in a while we can't get away with it as we'd like, we
have to take the best we can."

Thus was brought home to her more and more clearly that what men strove
and fought for were the joys of prominence, privilege, and
power. Everywhere, in the great world, they demanded and received
consideration. It was Ditmar's boast that if nobody else could get a
room in a crowded New York hotel, he could always obtain one. And
she was fain to concede--she who had never known privilege--a certain
intoxicating quality to this eminence. If you could get the power, and
refused to take it, the more fool you! A topsy-turvy world, in which the
stupid toiled day by day, week by week, exhausting their energies and
craving joy, while others adroitly carried off the prize; and virtue had
apparently as little to do with the matter as fair hair or a club foot.
If Janet had ever read Darwin, she would have recognized in her lover a
creature rather wonderfully adapted to his environment; and what
puzzled her, perhaps, was the riddle that presents itself to many better
informed than herself--the utter absence in this environment of the sign
of any being who might be called God. Her perplexities--for she did
have them--took the form of an instinctive sense of inadequacy, of
persistently recurring though inarticulate convictions of the existence
of elements not included in Ditmar's categories--of things that money
could not buy; of things, too, alas! that poverty was as powerless
to grasp. Stored within her, sometimes rising to