His attention was momentarily distracted by the remarkable antics of an elderly man.  This person was bowing and genuflecting before the goddess, rolling his eyes upward, throwing out his hands, clasping and wringing them—­a pantomime of speechless admiration.  To Andrew he looked like an elderly billy-goat with a thorn in its hoof.  The goddess looked down upon him with an expression of good-natured contempt.  The men applauded heartily.  Andrew once more riveted his gaze on the face which had completed his undoing.  In a moment the girl’s clear eyes met his, then moved past as indifferently as if she had gazed upon space.  Andrew turned, forgetting his hat, and almost ran from the house, down the street, and up the stairs to his apartment.  He flung himself into a chair, buried his face in his hands, and groaned aloud.  The hopelessness of his case surged through his brain with pitiless reiteration.  He might as well attempt to fly to one of the cold stars above his casement as to besiege the society of New York.  There was literally no human being out of earth’s millions to give him the line that would pass him through those open invincible portals.  Had he been a baboon from Central Africa, his chances would have been better; he would have compelled their attention for a moment.

There were heavy portieres over his door; no one could hear his groans, and he afforded himself that measure of relief.  The tears ran down his cheeks; he twisted his strong hands together.  Those whose hearts have been convulsed by the bitterness of love, by the loss of children, by the downfall of great hopes, may read with scorn this suffering of a snob.  It may seem a mean and trivial emotion.  But he has had scant opportunity to study his kind who knows nothing of the power of the snob to suffer.  An artist may toil on unrecognized, yet with the deep delight of his art as compensation.  A man in public life may be stung with a thousand bitter defeats, but he has the joy of the fight, the self-respect of legitimate ambition.  But for the repeated defeats of even the successful snob, what compensation?  Step by step he climbs, to find another still to mount, each bristling with obstacles, to which he yields the shreds and patches of his self-respect.  The bitter knowledge that he is on tolerance is ever with him—­that no matter how high he rises, he can never reach his goal, for at the goal are only those who have never known the need to strive.  ’Tis a constant battle for a soap-bubble, an ambition without soul.

And Andrew?  He had not even planted his foot on the first step.  For five years he had lived in a fool’s paradise, a corroding dream.  There was literally nothing else on earth that he wanted.  His money had come to him as the very irony of Fate.  It could not give him the one thing he wished, and he had no other use for it.  His dream was over.  He felt like an aged man set free from an asylum for the demented after a period of incarceration which had devoured the good years of his life.  He looked at what still seemed wealth to him as such a man would look at all the joys of light and liberty and taste, offered to his paralyzed senses.