Part 12

"However, he can't succeed," observed Hull.

"Oh, yes, he can," replied Jane. "And will. Even if every idea he had were foolish and wrong. And it isn't--is it?"

David laughed peculiarly. "He's infernally uncomfortably right in most of the things he charges and proposes. I don't like to think about it." He shut his teeth together. "I WON'T think about it," he muttered.

"No--you'd better stick to your own road, Davy," said Jane with irritating mockery. "You were born to be thoroughly conventional and respectable. As a reformer you're ideal. As a--an imitator of Victor Dorn, you'd be a joke."

"There's one of his men now," exclaimed Hull, leaning forward excitedly.

Jane looked. A working man, a commonplace enough object, was standing under the corner street lamp, the water running off his hat, his shoulders, his coat tail. His package of dodgers was carefully shielded by an oilcloth from the wet which had full swing at the man. To every passer-by he presented a dodger, accompanying the polite gesture with some phrase which seemed to move the man or woman to take what was offered and to put it away instead of dropping it.

Jane sank back in the carriage, disappointed. "Is that all?" said she disdainfully.

"ALL?" cried Hull. "Use your imagination, Jen. But I forgot--you're a woman. They see only surfaces."

"And are snared into marrying by complexions and pretty features and dresses and silly flirting tricks," retorted the girl sarcastically.

Hull laughed. "I spoke too quick that time," said he. "I suppose you expected to see something out of a fifteenth century Italian old master! Well--it was there, all right."

Jane shrugged her shoulders. "And your Victor Dorn," said she, "no doubt he's seated in some dry, comfortable place enjoying the thought of his men making fools of themselves for him."

They were drawing up to the curb before the Opera House where were the assembly rooms. "There he is now," cried Hull.

Jane, startled, leaned eagerly forward. In the rain beyond the edge of the awning stood a dripping figure not unlike that other which had so disappointed her. Underneath the brim of the hat she could see a smooth-shaven youngish face--almost boyish. But the rain streaming from the brim made satisfactory scrutiny impossible.

Jane again sank back. "How many carriages before us?" she said.

"You're disappointed in him, too, I suppose," said Hull. "I knew you would be."

"I thought he was tall," said Jane.

"Only middling," replied Hull, curiously delighted.

"I thought he was serious," said Jane.

"On the contrary, he's always laughing. He's the best natured man I know."

As they descended and started along the carpet under the middle of the awning, Jane halted. She glanced toward the dripping figure whom the police would not permit under the shelter. Said she: "I want one of those papers."

Davy moved toward the drenched distributor of strike literature. "Give me one, Dorn," he said in his most elegant manner.

"Sure, Davy," said Dorn in a tone that was a subtle commentary on Hull's aristocratic tone and manner. As he spoke he glanced at Jane; she was looking at him. Both smiled--at Davy's expense.

Davy and Jane passed on in, Jane folding the dodger to tuck it away for future reading. She said to him: "But you didn't tell me about his eyes."

"What's the matter with them?"

"Everything," replied she--and said no more.

The dance was even more tiresome than Jane had anticipated. There had been little pleasure in outshining the easily outshone belles of Remsen City. She had felt humiliated by having to divide the honors with a brilliantly beautiful and scandalously audacious Chicago girl, a Yvonne Hereford--whose style, in looks, in dress and in wit, was more comfortable to the standard of the best young men of Remsen City--a standard which Miss Hastings, cultivated by foreign travel and social adventure, regarded as distinctly poor, not to say low. Miss Hereford's audacities were especially offensive to Jane. Jane was audacious herself, but she flattered herself that she had a delicate sense of that baffling distinction between the audacity that is the hall mark of the lady and the audacity that proclaims the not-lady. For example, in such apparently trifling matters as the way of smoking a cigarette, the way of crossing the legs or putting the elbows on the table or using slang, Jane found a difference, abysmal though narrow, between herself and Yvonne Hereford. "But then, her very name gives her away," reflected Jane. "There'd surely be a frightfully cheap streak in a mother who in this country would name her daughter Yvonne--or in a girl who would name herself that."

However, Jane Hastings was not deeply annoyed either by the shortcomings of Remsen City young men or by the rivalry of Miss Hereford. Her dissatisfaction was personal--the feeling of futility, of cheapness, in having dressed herself in her best and spent a whole evening at such unworthy business. "Whatever I am or am not fit for," said she to herself, "I'm not for society--any kind of society. At least I'm too much grown-up mentally for that." Her disdainful thoughts about others were, on this occasion as almost always, merely a mode of expressing her self-scorn.

As she was undressing she found in her party bag the dodger Hull had got for her from Victor Dorn. She, sitting at her dressing table, started to read it at once. But her attention soon wandered. "I'm not in the mood," she said. "To-morrow." And she tossed it into the top drawer. The fact was, the subject of politics interested her only when some man in whom she was interested was talking it to her. In a general way she understood things political, but like almost all women and all but a few men she could fasten her attention only on things directly and clearly and nearly related to her own interests. Politics seemed to her to be not at all related to her--or, indeed, to anybody but the men running for office. This dodger was politics, pure and simple. A plea to workingmen to awaken to the fact that their STRIKES were stupid and wasteful, that the way to get better pay and decent hours of labor was by uniting, taking possession of the power that was rightfully theirs and regulating their own affairs.