For a week or two he did not even wish to see her, so ashamed and
sullied did he feel after the way his father had handled and bruised
the delicate situation, and the name of the young girl who so
innocently adorned it.
No, something had been spoiled for him, temporarily. He felt it.
Something of the sweetness, the innocence, the candour of this
blameless friendship had been marred. The bloom was rubbed off; the
piquant freshness and fragrance gone for the present.
It is true that an unexpected boom in his business kept him and his
father almost feverishly active and left them both fatigued at night.
This lasted for a week or two--long enough to excite all real estate
men with a hope for future prosperity not yet entirely dead. But at
the end of two or three weeks that hope began to die its usual,
lingering death.
Dulness set in; the talk was of Harlem, Westchester, and the Bronx: a
private bank failed, then three commercial houses went to the wall;
and a seat was sold for $25,000 on the Exchange. Business resumed its
normal and unexaggerated course. The days of boom were surely ended;
and vacant lots on Fifth Avenue threatened to remain vacant for a
while longer.
Clive began to drop in at his clubs again. One was a Whipper-Snapper
Club to which young Manhattan aspired when freshly released from
college; the others were of the fashionable and semi-fashionable sort,
tedious, monotonous, full of the aimless, the idle, or of that
bustling and showy smartness which is perhaps even less admirable and
less easy to endure.
Men destitute of mental resources and dependent upon others for their
amusement, disillusioned men, lazy men, socially ambitious men, men
gluttonously or alcoholically predisposed haunted these clubs. To one
of them repaired those who were inclined to racquettes, squash,
tennis, and the swimming tank. It was a sort of social clearing house
for other clubs.
But The Geyser was the least harmless of the clubs affected by C.
Bailey, Jr.,--it being an all-night resort and the haunt of the
hopeless sport. Here dissipation, futile, aimless, meaningless, was on
its native heath. Here, on his own stamping ground, prowled the
youthful scion of many a dissipated race--nouveau riche and
Knickerbocker alike. All that was required of anybody was money and a
depthless capacity.
It was in this place that Clive encountered Cecil Reeve one stormy
midnight.
"You don't come here often, do you?" said the latter.
Clive said he didn't.
"Neither do I. But when I do there's a few doing. Will you have a high
one, Clive? In deference to our late and revered university?"