He was not climbing.  To climb one must be conscious of an ascent to be surmounted.  Banneker was serenely unaware of anything above him, in that sense.  Eminent psychiatrists were, about that time, working upon the beginning of a theory of the soul, later to be imposed upon an impressionable and faddish world, which dealt with a profound psychical deficit known as a “complex of inferiority.”  In Banneker they would have found sterile soil.  He had no complex of inferiority, nor, for that matter, of superiority; mental attitudes which, applied to social status, breed respectively the toady and the snob.  He had no complex at all.  He had, or would have had, if the soul-analysts had invented such a thing, a simplex.  Relative status was a matter to which he gave little thought.  He maintained personal standards not because of what others might think of him, but because he chose to think well of himself.

Sherry’s and a fifth-row-center seat at opening nights meant to him something more than refreshment and amusement; they were an assertion of his right to certain things, a right of which, whether others recognized or ignored it, he felt absolutely assured.  These were the readily attainable places where successful people resorted.  Serenely determined upon success, he felt himself in place amidst the outward and visible symbols of it.  Let the price be high for his modest means; this was an investment which he could not afford to defer.  He was but anticipating his position a little, and in such wise that nobody could take exception to it, because his self-promotion demanded no aid or favor from any other living person.  His interest was in the environment, not in the people, as such, who were hardly more than, “walking ladies and gentlemen” in a mise-en-scene.  Indeed, where minor opportunities offered by chance of making acquaintances, he coolly rejected them.  Banneker did not desire to know people—­yet.  When he should arrive at the point of knowing them, it must be upon his terms, not theirs.

It was on one of his Monday evenings of splendor that a misadventure of the sort which he had long foreboded, befell him.  Sherry’s was crowded, and a few tables away Banneker caught sight of Herbert Cressey, dining with a mixed party of a dozen.  Presently Cressey came over.

“What have you been doing with yourself?” he asked, shaking hands.  “Haven’t seen you for months.”

“Working,” replied Banneker.  “Sit down and have a cocktail.  Two, Jules,” he added to the attentive waiter.

“I guess they can spare me for five minutes,” agreed Cressey, glancing back at his forsaken place.  “This isn’t what you call work, though, is it?”

“Hardly.  This is my day off.”

“Oh!  And how goes the job?”

“Well enough.”

“I’d think so,” commented the other, taking in the general effect of Banneker’s easy habituation to the standards of the restaurant.  “You don’t own this place, do you?” he added.