y
his success was a solid indubitable thing. If he weren't actually
preeminent in his special field, at least there was no one who was
accorded a preeminence over him.

But another ambition, quite apart from the professional one, was hardly
so well satisfied. From the time of his very earliest memories he had
felt a passionate admiration for good breeding, and a consuming envy of
the lucky unconscious possessors of it. Since ten years old, he had
been possessed by the great desire to be acknowledged a gentleman. There
was nothing of vulgar veneer about this. It was the real interior thing
he wanted; that invisible yet perfectly palpable hall-mark which without
explanations or credentials, classified you. His profession had not
brought him in contact more than very infrequently with people of this
sort, and his personal interests never could be made to do so with
results perfectly satisfactory to himself. There it was,--the thing
those lucky elect possessed without a thought or an effort. It was an
indestructible possession, apparently, too. You couldn't throw it away.
Dissipation, dishonesty, even a total collapse that brought its victim
down to the sink that he himself had sprouted from, seemed powerless to
efface that hall-mark.

He learned to suppose that if it were indestructible, it was also
unattainable, though perhaps he himself failed of attaining it only in
the consciousness of having failed--in the inability to stop trying for
it, straining all his actions through a sieve in the effort to conform
to a standard not his own.

Well, this girl, whose own life must have collapsed under her in a
peculiarly cruel and dramatic fashion so that she had had to come to him
and ask him for a job in the chorus--she had the hall-mark. She had
besides a lot of the qualities that traditionally went with it, but
often didn't. She was game--game as a fighting-cock. What must it not
have meant to her to come down into that squalid dance-hall in the first
place and submit to the test he had subjected her to! How must the
dressing-room conversation of her colleagues in the chorus have revolted
and sickened her? What must it mean to her to take his orders--sharp
rasping orders, with the sting of ridicule in the tail of them when they
had to be repeated;--to be addressed by her last name like a servant?
Why, this very afternoon, how must she have felt, standing there like a
manikin, ordered to put on this dress and that, by a fuss