But another ambition, quite apart from the professional one, was hardly so well satisfied.  From the time of his very earliest memories he had felt a passionate admiration for good breeding, and a consuming envy of the lucky unconscious possessors of it.  Since ten years old, he had been possessed by the great desire to be acknowledged a gentleman.  There was nothing of vulgar veneer about this.  It was the real interior thing he wanted; that invisible yet perfectly palpable hall-mark which without explanations or credentials, classified you.  His profession had not brought him in contact more than very infrequently with people of this sort, and his personal interests never could be made to do so with results perfectly satisfactory to himself.  There it was,—­the thing those lucky elect possessed without a thought or an effort.  It was an indestructible possession, apparently, too.  You couldn’t throw it away.  Dissipation, dishonesty, even a total collapse that brought its victim down to the sink that he himself had sprouted from, seemed powerless to efface that hall-mark.

He learned to suppose that if it were indestructible, it was also unattainable, though perhaps he himself failed of attaining it only in the consciousness of having failed—­in the inability to stop trying for it, straining all his actions through a sieve in the effort to conform to a standard not his own.

Well, this girl, whose own life must have collapsed under her in a peculiarly cruel and dramatic fashion so that she had had to come to him and ask him for a job in the chorus—­she had the hall-mark.  She had besides a lot of the qualities that traditionally went with it, but often didn’t.  She was game—­game as a fighting-cock.  What must it not have meant to her to come down into that squalid dance-hall in the first place and submit to the test he had subjected her to!  How must the dressing-room conversation of her colleagues in the chorus have revolted and sickened her?  What must it mean to her to take his orders—­sharp rasping orders, with the sting of ridicule in the tail of them when they had to be repeated;—­to be addressed by her last name like a servant?  Why, this very afternoon, how must she have felt, standing there like a manikin, ordered to put on this dress and that, by a fussy fat woman who wouldn’t have touched her with tongs?  But from not one of these experiences had he ever seen her flinch or protest.  Oh, yes, she was game, and she was simple, as they always were; a fine type of the real thing.

And, somehow, he felt, she treated him as if he were hall-marked too.  He hadn’t much to go by—­absurdly little things really.  But, after all, it was the little things that counted;—­a fine distinction in the cadence of a voice, in the sort of nod of greeting or farewell one gave.  She never nodded at him in that curt telegraphic sort of way without warming him up a bit inside.