The Whitneys were leading in Chicago in building broad and ever broader the barriers, not between rich and poor, but between the very, very rich and all the rest of the world.  Mrs. Whitney had made a painstaking and reverent study of upper-class life in England and on the Continent, and was endeavoring to use her education for the instruction of her associates, and for the instilling of a proper awe into the multitude.  To enter her door was at once to get the impression that one was receiving a high privilege.  One would have been as greatly shocked as was Mrs. Whitney herself, could one have overheard “Charley” saying to her, as he occasionally did, with a grin which he strove to make as “common” as he knew how, “Really, Tillie, if you don’t let up a little on this putting on dog, I’ll have to take to sneaking in by the back way.  The butler’s a sight more of a gent than I am, and the housekeeper can give you points on being a real, head-on-a-pole-over-the-shoulder lady.”  A low fellow at heart was Charley Whitney, like so many of his similarly placed compatriots, though he strove as hard as do they, almost as hard as his wife, to conceal the deficiencies due to early training in vulgarly democratic ways of living and thinking.

Arthur, ushered by the excruciatingly fashionable butler into the smallest of the series of reception salons, fell straightway into the most melancholy spirits.  He felt the black, icy shadow of the beginnings of doubt as to his right to admittance on terms of equality, now that his titles to nobility had been torn from him and destroyed.  He felt that he was in grave danger of being soon mingled in the minds of his fashionable friends and their servants with the vulgar herd, the respectable but “impossible” middle classes.  Indeed, he was not sure that he didn’t really belong among them.  The sound of Janet’s subdued, most elegant rustle, drove out of his mind everything but an awful dread of what she would say and think and feel when he had disclosed to her the hideous truth.  She came sweeping in, her eyes full of unshed tears, her manner a model of refined grief, sympathetic, soothing.  She was tall and slim, a perfect figure of the long, lithe type; her face was small and fine and dreamy; her hair of an unusual straw color, golden, yet pale, too, like the latest autumn leaves in the wan sun of November; her eyes were hazel, in strange and thrilling contrast to her hair.  To behold her was to behold all that man finds most fascinating in woman, but so illumined by the soul within that to look on it with man’s eye for charms feminine seemed somewhat like casting sensuous glances upon beauty enmarbled in a temple’s fane.  Janet was human, but the human that points the way to sexless heaven.

“Dear Artie!” she said gently. “Dear Artie!” And she took both his hands and, as she looked at him, her tears fell.  Arthur, in his new humility of poverty, felt honored indeed that any loss of his could cause her matchless soul thus to droop upon its dazzling outer walls the somber, showery insignia of grief.  “But,” she went on, “you have him still with you—­his splendid, rugged character, the memory of all he did for you.”