When the subtle change came, his mother and sister uneasily confided to each other the fear that he was in love.  As the years passed, however, and he brought them no new demand upon their affections and resources, they ceased to worry, and finally to wonder.  Andrew was not the old Andrew; but, if he did not choose to confide the reason, his reserve must be respected.  And at least it had affected neither his generosity nor his good temper.  He still spent his evenings at home, listened to his mother or Polly read aloud, and never missed the little supper of beer and crackers and cheese before retiring.

II

One morning, while Webb was still one with his little family, he read, as was usual with him on the long ride down-town, his Harlem edition of one of the New York dailies.  He finished the news, the editorials, the special articles:  nothing was there to upset the equilibrium of his life.  His attention was attracted, as he was about to close the paper, by a long leaded “story” of a ball given the night before by some people named Webb.  Their superior social importance was made manifest by the space and type allotted them, by the fact that their function was not held over for the Sunday issue, and by the imposing rhetoric of the head-lines.

Andrew read the story with a feeling of personal interest.  From that moment, unsuspected by himself, the readjustment of his mind to other interests began—­the divorce of his inner life from the simple conditions of his youth.

Thereafter he searched the Society columns for accounts of the doings of the Webb folk.  Thence, by a natural deflection, he became generally interested in the recreations of the great world:  he acquired a habit, much to his sister’s delight, of buying the weekly chronicles of Society, and all the Sunday issues of the important dailies.

At first the sparkle and splendor, the glamour and mystery of the world of fashion dazzled and delighted him.  It was to him what fairy tales of prince and princess are to children.  For even he, prosaic, phlegmatic, with nerves of iron and brain of shallows, had in him that germ of the picturesque which in some natures shoots to high and full-flowered ideals, in others to lofty or restless ambitions, coupled with a true love of art; and yet again develops a weed of tenacious root and coarse enduring fibre which a clever maker of words has named snobbery.

Gradually within Andrew’s slow mind grew a dull resentment against Fate for having played him so sinister a trick as to give him the husk without the kernel, a title without a story that any one would ever care to read.  Why, when one of those Webb babies was due,—­the family appeared to be a large one,—­could not his little wandering ego have found its way into that ugly but notable mansion on Fifth Avenue instead of having been spitefully guided to a New Jersey farm?  Not that Andrew expressed himself in this wise.  Had he put his thoughts into words, he would probably have queried in good terse English:  “Why in thunder can’t I be Schuyler Churchill Webb instead of a nobody in Harlem?  He’s just my age, and I might as well have been he as not.”