It was the most amiable
of the vices. But he thought too well of himself for any such admission,
and his mind had not been trained to fish, even, in shallow waters.
Nor did he admit that if the lovely Miss Groome had been a stenographer
he would not have looked at her. He would indeed have turned his face
resolutely in the other direction if she had happened to sit in his
employer's office. Fate forbade him a marriage of that sort, and dalliance
with an inferior was forbidden both by his morals and his social integrity.
But that Alexina Groome should be beautiful, as exaltedly born as only
a San Franciscan of the old stock might be, with a determinate income,
however modest, with a background of friendly males, as substantial
financially as socially, who would be sure to give a new member of the
family a leg-up (he liked the atmosphere and flavor of the lighter English
novels), and, above all, responsive, seemed to him a direct reward for the
circumspect life he had lived and his fidelity to his chosen upward path.
III
He was free to fall in love as profoundly as was in him, and during that
early hour of the agitated night, with that pit of hell roaring below to
the steady undertone of a thousand tramping feet, he felt, despite the fact
that all business was moribund for the present and his savings were in the
hot vaults of a dynamited bank, that he was a supremely fortunate young
man.
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