His twenty-third birthday cake, prepared by loving hands, had scarcely been eaten when the waves of snobbery first lapped his feet.  At twenty-five they had broken high above his head, and the surge was ever in his ears.  He was not acutely miserable:  his health was too perfect, his appetite too good.  But deeper and deeper each week did he bury his perplexed head in the social folk-lore of New York and Newport.  Oftener and oftener during the city season did he promenade central Fifth Avenue from half-past four until half-past five in the afternoon of pleasant days.  He lived for the hour which would find him sauntering from Forty-first Street to the Park and back again.  He knew all the fashionable men and women by sight.  There was no one to tell him their names, but the names themselves were more familiar than the rows of figures in his books down-town.  He fitted them to such presences as seemed to demand them as their right.  He grew into a certain intimacy with the slender trimly accoutred girls who held themselves so erectly and wore their hair with such maidenly severity.  They were so different in appearance from all the women he had known or seen, and from the languishing creatures in his mother’s cherished Book of Beauty, that he came to look upon them as a race apart, which they were; as something not quite human, which was a slander.  As they stalked along so briskly in their tailor-made frocks, their cheeks and eyes brilliant with health, the average observer would have likened them to healthy high-bred young race-horses.

On the whole, however, Andrew gave the full measure of his admiration to the women who took their exercise less violently.  When the spring came, and the Park was green, he would stand in the plaza, surrounded by its great hotels, the deep rumble of the avenue behind him, forgetting even the phalanxes of tramping girls, with their accessories of boys and poodles.  Before him were the wide gates of the Park, the green wooded knolls rolling away—­almost to his home in Harlem.  Just beyond the gates was a bend in the driveway, and he never tired of watching the stream of carriages wind as from a cavern and roll out to the avenue.  The vivid background claimed as its own those superb traps with their dainty burdens of women who held their heads so haughtily, whose plumage was so brilliant.  The horses glittered and pranced.  The parasols fluttered like butterflies above the flower-faces beneath.  Webb would stand entranced, bitterly thankful that there was such a scene for him to look upon, choking back a sob that he had no part in it.