The drift of events for a period of five years carried Lester and Jennie still farther apart; they settled naturally into their respective spheres, without the renewal of the old time relationship which their several meetings at the Tremont at first seemed to foreshadow. Lester was in the thick of social and commercial affairs; he walked in paths to which Jennie’s retiring soul had never aspired. Jennie’s own existence was quiet and uneventful. There was a simple cottage in a very respectable but not showy neighbourhood near Jackson Park, on the South Side, where she lived in retirement with a little foster-child — a chestnut-haired girl taken from the Western Home for the Friendless — as her sole companion. Here she was known as Mrs. J. G. Stover, for she had deemed it best to abandon the name of Kane. Mr. and Mrs. Lester Kane when resident in Chicago were the occupants of a handsome mansion on the Lake Shore Drive, where parties, balls, receptions, dinners were given in rapid and at times almost pyrotechnic succession.

Lester, however, had become in his way a lover of a peaceful and well-entertained existence. He had cut from his list of acquaintances and associates a number of people who had been a little doubtful or overfamiliar or indifferent or talkative during a certain period which to him was a memory merely. He was a director, and in several cases the chairman of a board of directors, in nine of the most important financial and commercial organisations of the West — The United Traction Company of Cincinnati, The Western Crucible Company, The United Carriage Company, The Second National Bank of Chicago, the First National Bank of Cincinnati, and several others of equal importance. He was never a personal factor in the affairs of The United Carriage Company, preferring to be represented by counsel — Mr. Dwight L. Watson, but he took a keen interest in its affairs. He had not seen his brother Robert to speak to him in seven years. He had not seen Imogene, who lived in Chicago, in three. Louise, Amy, their husbands, and some of their closest acquaintances were practically strangers. The firm of Knight, Keatley & O’Brien had nothing whatever to do with his affairs.

The truth was that Lester, in addition to becoming a little phlegmatic, was becoming decidedly critical in his outlook on life. He could not make out what it was all about. In distant ages a queer thing had come to pass. There had started on its way in the form of evolution a minute cellular organism which had apparently reproduced itself by division, had early learned to combine itself with others, to organise itself into bodies, strange forms of fish, animals, and birds, and had finally learned to organise itself into man. Man, on his part, composed as he was of self-organising cells, was pushing himself forward into comfort and different aspects of existence by means of union and organisation with other men. Why? Heaven only knew. Here he was endowed with a peculiar brain and a certain amount of talent, and he had inherited a certain amount of wealth which he now scarcely believed he deserved, only luck had favoured him. But he could not see that any one else might be said to deserve this wealth any more than himself, seeing that his use of it was as conservative and constructive and practical as the next one’s. He might have been born poor, in which case he would have been as well satisfied as the next one — not more so. Why should he complain, why worry, why speculate?— the world was going steadily forward of its own volition, whether he would or no. Truly it was. And was there any need for him to disturb himself about it? There was not. He fancied at times that it might as well never have been started at all. “The one divine, far-off event” of the poet did not appeal to him as having any basis in fact. Mrs. Lester Kane was of very much the same opinion.

分享到：