“I would still be plowing rocks and milking cows, Carl, if I acknowledged the possibility of failing in what I resolve on.”

“Yet they may refuse to sell.”

Hamilton Burton smiled.  “That would be regrettable,” he said, and his voice was full of sympathetic softness.  “Because in that event an elderly and respected member of the senate will have to reside for a time at Sing Sing and a couple of widely trusted banks will go to the wall.”

CHAPTER XIV

From the Plaza upward, the blank stare of the avenue was awakening into renewed signs of habitation.  Burglar-proof doors had come down and boarded windows had yielded to curtained sashes.  Already in the park the trees were turning.  Banners of crimson, yellow and burgundy flaunted where the foliage had been sunburned and heat-corroded.  The walks and Mall had for scorching weeks been a breathing refuge, and the sheep-pasture a sleeping place, for shirt-sleeved men who panted like dogs.  Haggard women and sunken-cheeked children—­all heat-fagged and exhausted—­had held possession; but now the bridle-path echoed to hoof-beats, and smartly togged equestrians galloped there, while along the driveways droned a purr of motors.

The sun, which had assaulted, blighted and killed, now caressed a revived city, for autumn had come with her clarifying elixirs and her fever-cooling frosts.

Shop windows, freshly decked, tempted the passerby with foretastes of the season’s styles in gowns and hats and furs.  All was color and sparkle and activity.  Soft tones awoke at sunset on old and seasoned walls.  Gilt street signs blazed and shaft-like buildings stood out in splintered strips of a dozen hues against skies that were unsullied turquoise.

In the veins of Hamilton Burton, as he motored up-town, a heady exhilaration mounted like wine.  As his car bowled up the avenue he watched the human mosaic, and the drive seemed a progress through Bagdad.  He was finding it all the city of his dreams: 

      “—­a city blazoned like a missal book,
    Black with oaken gables, carven and enscrolled. 
      Every street a colored page:  every sign a hieroglyph,
    Dusky with enchantments:  a city paved with gold.”

Then as he entered his own house he remembered.  Tonight he must go to the opera and the prospect bored him.  To Paul, of course, it was as wine to the drunkard, but to Hamilton it meant a tedious evening.  It was in a way a duty and one of his few concessions to Society’s requirements.  Had it not been written of another great figure, “the Emperor sat in his box that night?” He would leave early and later in the evening he could console himself with a matter of greater importance.

Yet when he arrived at the Metropolitan he forgot to be bored—­until the overture ended, and Music was enthroned in the place of Fashion.