“Neither of them would do me any good,” she complained.

“You could go to the manicure,” he said.

There had been in Ditmar’s life certain events which, in his anecdotal moods, were magnified into matters of climacteric importance; high, festal occasions on which it was sweet to reminisce, such as his visit as Delegate at Large to that Chicago Convention.  He had travelled on a special train stocked with cigars and White Seal champagne, in the company of senators and congressmen and ex-governors, state treasurers, collectors of the port, mill owners, and bankers to whom he referred, as the French say, in terms of their “little” names.  He dwelt on the magnificence of the huge hotel set on the borders of a lake like an inland sea, and related such portions of the festivities incidental to “the seeing of Chicago” as would bear repetition.  No women belonged to this realm; no women, at least, who were to be regarded as persons.  Ditmar did not mention them, but no doubt they existed, along with the cigars and the White Seal champagne, contributing to the amenities.  And the excursion, to Janet, took on the complexion of a sort of glorified picnic in the course of which, incidentally, a President of the United States had been chosen.  In her innocence she had believed the voters to perform this function.  Ditmar laughed.

“Do you suppose we’re going to let the mob run this country?” he inquired.  “Once in a while we can’t get away with it as we’d like, we have to take the best we can.”

Thus was brought home to her more and more clearly that what men strove and fought for were the joys of prominence, privilege, and power.  Everywhere, in the great world, they demanded and received consideration.  It was Ditmar’s boast that if nobody else could get a room in a crowded New York hotel, he could always obtain one.  And she was fain to concede —­she who had never known privilege—­a certain intoxicating quality to this eminence.  If you could get the power, and refused to take it, the more fool you!  A topsy-turvy world, in which the stupid toiled day by day, week by week, exhausting their energies and craving joy, while others adroitly carried off the prize; and virtue had apparently as little to do with the matter as fair hair or a club foot.  If Janet had ever read Darwin, she would have recognized in her lover a creature rather wonderfully adapted to his environment; and what puzzled her, perhaps, was the riddle that presents itself to many better informed than herself—­the utter absence in this environment of the sign of any being who might be called God.  Her perplexities—­for she did have them—­took the form of an instinctive sense of inadequacy, of persistently recurring though inarticulate convictions of the existence of elements not included in Ditmar’s categories—­of things that money could not buy; of things, too, alas! that poverty was as powerless to grasp.  Stored within her, sometimes rising to the level of consciousness,