Part 73

"Five thousand dollars," he said, reflectively. "Your father certainly was a queer mixture of surprises and contradictions. Now, who would have suspected him of a piece of sentiment like this? Pure sentiment. He must have felt that I'd not be able to save him, and he knew my bill wouldn't be one-tenth this sum."

"He liked you, and admired you," said Jane.

"He was very generous where he liked and admired."

Charlton put the money back in the envelope, put the envelope in his pocket. "I'll give the money to the Children's Hospital," said he. "About six months ago I completed the sum I had fixed on as necessary to my independence; so, I've no further use for money--except to use it up as it comes in."

"You may marry some day," suggested Jane.

"Not a woman who wishes to be left richer than independent," replied he. "As for the children, they'll be brought up to earn their own independence. I'll leave only incubators and keepsakes when I die. But no estate. I'm not that foolish and inconsiderate."

"What a queer idea!" exclaimed Jane.

"On the contrary, it's simplest common sense. The idea of giving people something they haven't earned--that's the queer idea."

"You are SO like Victor Dorn!"

"That reminds me!" exclaimed Charlton. "It was very negligent of me to forget. The day your father died I dropped in on Victor and told him--him and Selma Gordon--about it. And both asked me to take you their sympathy. They said a great deal about your love for your father, and how sad it was to lose him. They were really distressed."

Jane's face almost brightened. "I've been rather hurt because I hadn't received a word of sympathy from--them," she said.

"They'd have come, themselves, except that politics has made a very ugly feeling against them--and Galland's your brother-in-law."

"I understand," said Jane. "But I'm not Galland--and not of that party."

"Oh, yes, you are of that party," replied Charlton. "You draw your income from it, and one belongs to whatever he draws his income from. Civilization means property--as yet. And it doesn't mean men and women--as yet. So, to know the man or the woman we look at the property."

"That's hideously unjust," cried Jane.

"Don't be utterly egotistical," said Charlton. "Don't attach so much importance to your little, mortal, WEAK personality. Try to realize that you're a mere chip in the great game of chance. You're a chip with the letter P on it--which stands for Plutocracy. And you'll be played as you're labeled."

"You make it very hard for any one to like you."

"Well--good-by, then."

And ignoring her hasty, half-laughing, half-serious protests he took himself away. She was intensely irritated. A rapid change in her outward character had been going forward since her father's death--a change in the direction of intensifying the traits that had always been really dominant, but had been less apparent because softened by other traits now rapidly whithering.

The cause of the change was her inheritance.

Martin Hastings, remaining all his life in utter ignorance of the showy uses of wealth and looking on it with the eyes of a farm hand, had remained the enriched man of the lower classes, at heart a member of his original class to the end. The effect of this upon Jane had been to keep in check all the showy and arrogant, all the upper class, tendencies which education and travel among the upper classes of the East and of Europe had implanted in her. So long as plain old Martin lived, she could not FEEL the position she had--or, rather, would some day have--in the modern social system. But just as soon as he passed away, just as soon as she became a great heiress, actually in possession of that which made the world adore, that which would buy servility, flattery, awe--just so soon did she begin to be an upper-class lady.

She had acquired a superficial knowledge of business--enough to enable her to understand what the various items in the long, long schedule of her holdings meant. Symbols of her importance, of her power. She had studied the "great ladies" she had met in her travels and visitings. She had been impressed by the charm of the artistic, carefully cultivated air of simplicity and equality affected by the greatest of these great ladies as those born to wealth and position. To be gentle and natural, to be gracious--that was the "proper thing." So, she now adopted a manner that was if anything too kindly. Her pose, her mask, behind which she was concealing her swollen and still swelling pride and sense of superiority, as yet fitted badly. She "overacted," as youth is apt to do. She would have given a shrewd observer--one not dazzled by her wealth beyond the power of clear sight--the impression that she was pitying the rest of mankind, much as we all pity and forbear with a hopeless cripple.

But the average observer would simply have said: "What a sweet, natural girl, so unspoiled by her wealth!"--just as the hopeless cripple says, "What a polite person," as he gets the benefit of effusive good manners that would, if he were shrewd, painfully remind him that he was an unfortunate creature.

Of all the weeds that infest the human garden snobbishness, the commonest, is the most prolific, and it is a mighty cross breeder, too--modifying every flower in the garden, changing colors from rich to glaring, changing odors from perfumes to sickening-sweet or to stenches. The dead hands of Martin Hastings scattered showers of shining gold upon his daughter's garden; and from these seeds was springing a heavy crop of that most prolific of weeds.

She was beginning to resent Charlton's manner--bluff, unceremonious, candid, at times rude. He treated women exactly as he treated men, and he treated all men as intimates, free and easy fellow travelers afoot upon a dusty, vulgar highway. She had found charm in that manner, so natural to the man of no pretense, of splendid physical proportions, of the health of a fine tree. She was beginning to get into the state of mind at which practically all very rich people in a civilized society sooner or later arrive--a state of mind that makes it impossible for any to live with or near them except hirelings and dependents. The habit of power of any kind breeds intolerance of equality of level intercourse. This is held in check, often held entirely in check, where the power is based upon mental superiority; for the very superiority of the mind keeps alive the sense of humor and the sense of proportion. Not so the habit of money power. For money power is brutal, mindless. And as it is the only real power in any and all aristocracies, aristocracies are inevitably brutal and brutalizing.

If Jane had been poor, or had remained a few years longer--until her character was better set--under the restraining influence of her unfrilled and unfrillable father, her passion for power, for superiority would probably have impelled her to develop her mind into a source of power and position. Fate abruptly gave her the speediest and easiest means to power known in our plutocratic civilization. She would have had to be superhuman in beauty of character or a genius in mind to have rejected the short and easy way to her goal and struggled on in the long and hard--and doubtful--way.

She did not herself appreciate the change within herself. She fancied she was still what she had been two weeks before. For as yet nothing had occurred to enable her to realize her changed direction, her changed view of life. Thus, she was still thinking of Victor Dorn as she had thought of him; and she was impatient to see him. She was now free FREE! She could, without consulting anybody, have what she wanted. And she wanted Victor Dorn.

She had dropped from her horse and with her arm through the bridle was strolling along one of the quieter roads which Victor often took in his rambles. It was a tonic October day, with floods of sunshine upon the gorgeous autumnal foliage, never more gorgeous than in that fall of the happiest alternations of frost and warmth. She heard the pleasant rustle of quick steps in the fallen leaves that carpeted the byroad. She knew it was he before she glanced; and his first view of her face was of its beauty enhanced by a color as delicate and charming as that in the leaves about them.