The President | Page 3

his hold on earth, and avoid translation before his hour
was ripe.
It was no pale morality that got between Richard and the wine cup. In

another day at college he had emptied many. But early in his twenties,
Richard discovered that he carried his drink uneasily; it gave a Gothic
cant to his spirit, which, under its warm spell, turned warlike. Once,
having sat late at dinner--this was in that seminary town in France
where he attended school--he bestrode a certain iron lion, the same
strange to him and guarding the portals of a public building. Being thus
happily placed, he drew two huge American six-shooters, whereof his
possession was wrapped in mystery even to himself, and blazed
vacuously, yet ferociously, at the moon. Spoken to by the constabulary
who came flying to the spot, Richard replied with acrimony.
"If you interfere with me," remarked Richard on that explosive
occasion, addressing the French constables, "I'll buy your town and
burn it." The last with a splendid disdain of limitations that was
congenital.
Exploits similar to the above taught Richard the futility of alcoholic
things, and thereupon he cultivated a Puritan sobriety upon coffee and
tobacco.
Richard cast the half-burned cigar into the fire. Stepping to the mantel,
he took from it a small metal casket, builded to hold jewels. What
should be those gems of price which the metal box protected? Richard
did not strike one as the man to nurse a weakness for barbaric
adornment. A bathrobe is not a costume calculated to teach one the
wearer's fineness. To say best, a bathrobe is but a savage thing. It is the
garb most likely to obscure and set backward even a Walpole or a
Chesterfield in any impression of gentility. In spite of this primitive
regalia, however, Richard gave forth an idea of elevation, and as
though his ancestors in their civilization had long ago climbed above a
level where men put on gold to embellish their worth. What, then, did
that casket of carved bronze contain?
Richard took from its velvet interior the heel of a woman's shoe and
kissed it. It was a little kissable heel, elegant in fashion; one could tell
how it belonged aforetime to the footwear of a beautiful girl. Perhaps
this thought was aided by the reverent preoccupation of Richard as he
regarded it, for he set the boot-heel on the table and hung over it in a

rapt way that had the outward features of idolatry. It was right that he
should; the little heel spoke of Richard's first strong passion.
You will retrace the year to the 10th of June. Richard, after roving the
Eastern earth for a decade, had just returned to his own land, which he
hardly knew. Throughout those ten years of long idling from one
European city to another, had Richard met the woman he might love,
he would have laid siege to her, conquered her, and brought her home
as his wife. But his instinct was too tribal, too American. Whether it
were Naples or Paris or Vienna or St. Petersburg or Berlin, those
women whom he met might have pleased him in everything save
wedlock. In London, and for a moment, Richard saw a girl he looked at
twice. But she straightway drank beer with the gusto of a barge-man,
and the vision passed.
It was the evening after his return, and Richard at the Waldorf sat
amusing himself with those tides of vulgar humanity that ebb and flow
in a stretch of garish corridor known as Peacock Lane. Surely it was a
hopeless place wherein to seek a wife, and Richard had no such thought.
But who shall tell how and when and where his fate will overtake him?
Who is to know when Satan--or a more benevolent spirit--will be
hiding behind the hedge to play good folk a marriage trick? And
Richard had been warned. Once, in Calcutta, price one rupee, a
necromancer after fullest reading of the signs informed him that when
he met the woman who should make a wife to him, she would come
upon him suddenly. Wherefore, he should have kept a brighter watch,
expecting the unexpected.
Richard's gaze went following two rustical people--clearly bride and
groom. In a cloudy way he loathed the groom, and was foggily
wondering why. His second thought would have told him that the male
of his species--such is his sublime egotism--feels cheated with every
wedding not his own, and, for an earliest impulse on beholding a
woman with another man, would tear her from that other one by force.
Thus did his skinclad ancestors when time was.
However, Richard had but scanty space wherein either to enjoy his
blunt hatred of that bridegroom or theorize as to its roots. His ear

caught a muffled scream,