"Why not?" asked Porcellis. "Shakespeare lived in a country and time of expanding intellectual conceptions, and he expressed them the way I’ve said. We live in a country and time of tremendous financial combination and expansion; we’re not working in the material of intellectual conceptions, except as we conceive finance intellectually; we’re working with figures and dollar-marks and differentials and compound interest and dividends as complicated as an astronomer’s calculations. Well, this little old man in Wall Street can see those figures before they happen; he can make them come to life out of nothing—make them happen, give them life just the way Shakespeare gave life to another sort of ideas. These ideas are the ideas of our country; they are our country. Here is a genius that most fully and powerfully, most intensely and perfectly expresses them, and so I say he is the American Shakespeare."
Luke writhed in his chair opposite Porcellis. He could withhold the question no longer.
"Then"—he almost blurted it out at last—"those campaign contributions——"
"Those!" he said lightly. "You’ll have to ask Brouwer Leighton about them."
§3. After they left the theater, the two young men were driven, again in the motor belonging to Mrs. Porcellis, up the noisy river of yellow light that was Broadway, where their vehicle joined a long procession, until they reached a cross-street in the early Fifties. Then their car darted from the parade and plunged through a dark thoroughfare to Fifth Avenue. They drew up before a house where Luke could at first see little save that from its doorway, high above the pavement, a long and narrow tent of white canvas striped with red ran to the curb. Several other motors were ahead of theirs, so theirs had to wait its turn.
"It does look rather like a barn from the outside," he said, guessing his companion’s thought and agreeing with it. "That’s a Ruysdael way: they maintain the old tradition of severe exteriors; they don’t believe in flaunting their wealth in the face of the public; they believe in keeping the best for their friends."
Luke leaned shamelessly forward. Whenever he had gone to dances heretofore, the houses of his hostesses had shown lights in every window and dispensed a glow of festivity to the streets; but this house, essentially forbidding, stood dark and silent, its windows masked. Except for the faint illumination of a street-lamp that sputtered bluely at the corner, the only scintillations visible were two thin lines of radiance, one along the pavement, at the bottom of the entrance-tent, and a corresponding one above, between the walls of the tent and the loose overhang of its roof: these and a glowing spot at the end of the tent upon the curb where, between rows of ragged night figures watching the scene, dismounting guests appeared and disappeared—white shirt-fronts, and opera-cloaks, and the glint of jewels—like pictures in dissolving views.