If he could do this thing now, even considerately, he could do much more when he was free and away later.
Immersed in his great affairs, he would forget, of course.
And why not?
She did not fit in.
Had not everything—everything illustrated that to her?
Love was not enough in this world—that was so plain.
One needed education, wealth, training, the ability to fight and scheme, She did not want to do that.
She could not.
The day came when the house was finally closed and the old life was at an end.
Lester traveled with Jennie to Sandwood. He spent some little while in the house trying to get her used to the idea of change—it was not so bad.
He intimated that he would come again soon, but he went away, and all his words were as nothing against the fact of the actual and spiritual separation.
When Jennie saw him going down the brick walk that afternoon, his solid, conservative figure clad in a new tweed suit, his overcoat on his arm, self-reliance and prosperity written all over him, she thought that she would die. She had kissed Lester good-by and had wished him joy, prosperity, peace; then she made an excuse to go to her bedroom.
Vesta came after a time, to seek her, but now her eyes were quite dry; everything had subsided to a dull ache.
The new life was actually begun for her—a life without Lester, without Gerhardt, without any one save Vesta.
"What curious things have happened to me!" she thought, as she went into the kitchen, for she had determined to do at least some of her own work.
She needed the distraction.
She did not want to think.
If it were not for Vesta she would have sought some regular outside employment.
Anything to keep from brooding, for in that direction lay madness.
CHAPTER LV
The social and business worlds of Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and other cities saw, during the year or two which followed the breaking of his relationship with Jennie, a curious rejuvenation in the social and business spirit of Lester Kane.
He had become rather distant and indifferent to certain personages and affairs while he was living with her, but now he suddenly appeared again, armed with authority from a number of sources, looking into this and that matter with the air of one who has the privilege of power, and showing himself to be quite a personage from the point of view of finance and commerce.
He was older of course.
It must be admitted that he was in some respects a mentally altered Lester.
Up to the time he had met Jennie he was full of the assurance of the man who has never known defeat.
To have been reared in luxury as he had been, to have seen only the pleasant side of society, which is so persistent and so deluding where money is concerned, to have been in the run of big affairs not because one has created them, but because one is a part of them and because they are one's birthright, like the air one breathes, could not help but create one of those illusions of solidarity which is apt to befog the clearest brain.
It is so hard for us to know what we have not seen. It is so difficult for us to feel what we have not experienced.
Like this world of ours, which seems so solid and persistent solely because we have no knowledge of the power which creates it, Lester's world seemed solid and persistent and real enough to him.
It was only when the storms set in and the winds of adversity blew and he found himself facing the armed forces of convention that he realized he might be mistaken as to the value of his personality, that his private desires and opinions were as nothing in the face of a public conviction; that he was wrong.
The race spirit, or social avatar, the "Zeitgeist" as the Germans term it, manifested itself as something having a system in charge, and the organization of society began to show itself to him as something based on possibly a spiritual, or, at least, superhuman counterpart.
He could not fly in the face of it.
He could not deliberately ignore its mandates.
The people of his time believed that some particular form of social arrangement was necessary, and unless he complied with that he could, as he saw, readily become a social outcast.
His own father and mother had turned on him—his brother and sisters, society, his friends.
Dear heaven, what a to-do this action of his had created!
Why, even the fates seemed adverse.
His real estate venture was one of the most fortuitously unlucky things he had ever heard of.
Why?
Were the gods battling on the side of a to him unimportant social arrangement?
Apparently.
Anyhow, he had been compelled to quit, and here he was, vigorous, determined, somewhat battered by the experience, but still forceful and worth while.
And it was a part of the penalty that he had become measurably soured by what had occurred. He was feeling that he had been compelled to do the first ugly, brutal thing of his life.
Jennie deserved better of him.
It was a shame to forsake her after all the devotion she had manifested.
Truly she had played a finer part than he.
Worst of all, his deed could not be excused on the grounds of necessity.
He could have lived on ten thousand a year; he could have done without the million and more which was now his.
He could have done without the society, the pleasures of which had always been a lure.
He could have, but he had not, and he had complicated it all with the thought of another woman.
Was she as good as Jennie?