Page:The Smart Set (Volume 52, Number 4).djvu/7

CHAPTER 1

SO good an authority as Virgil, whose verse another poet has called “the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man,” remarked one day, possibly to his friend Horace, that “the shrubs and humble tamarisks have not their charms for all.”

Almost two thousand years later another Horace, this time resident near Buffalo in the State of New York, came upon this aphorism and felt his life justified by classical precedent.

Horace Blackwell thought in terms of rich and rare orchids. When he thought of music it was Grand Opera that concerned him. The heroines of his dreams wore splendid stuffs of silk and velvet bought in far countries and about their white arms these dim princesses wore strange bracelets of carven jade greener than the distant sea.

Had he been enabled to choose the lot in life that he would have liked, Horace Blackwell would have dwelt in an old castle, gray with memories, and walked over springing turf that had shaken beneath the weight of armored knights and chargers in a day when there were courts of love, and tournaments were the diversions of the rulers.

Horace, therefore, at a small town near Buffalo which was a collection of factories rather than an eligible site for homes, felt the oppression of his lot more than most men. It is true the house of his aunt in which he had been brought up was the best house in the town. And it was true that this estima- ble lady had money which would be his. But there were drawbacks he could not overlook.

Smitten with the belief that work inevitably enobles, Mrs. Blackwell had insisted her nephew enter one of the factories that encircled her pleasant home. She preferred that he take a dinner pail and work from the bot- tom up. The lower rungs taught so much more of the real and lasting values of life, she explained.

Horace listened to her patiently. He was newly come from a small college and intolerant of provincial advice, but he knew so little of the life commercial that he supposed she was right in what she said.

But he grew agitated when he understood that she expected him to work as a common laborer so that when he arrived at her age he would be a partner in a factory which turned out so many millions of bottle openers a year.

“How old are you?” he demanded.

Mrs. Blackwell admitted being sixty-three. It seemed that her natal year had been marked by unprecedented calamities in the neighborhood, disasters by fire and flood, so that she could not possibly be mistaken.

“And I am twenty-three,” he mused, “so that if I live forty years more I can own a part interest in a factory.”

His aunt was disconcerted by an aimless question he flung at her with almost an appearance of anger. ‘“And what sort of hands shall I have when I am your age?”

“Hands ?” she cried. ‘“What has that to do with it?”

He knew better than to tell her what was in his mind. He had beautiful hands for a man, long, white with tapering fingers and carefully kept

nails. Many and many a time he had