At the store! At eight! “And he hasn’t in the least the look of that sort of chap,” thought Frothingham. As for rising at half-past six, one might do it to hunt or shoot. But to do it morning after morning “merely to set a lot of bounders to selling a lot of cloth”--preposterous!
After a few days of Chicago Frothingham felt utterly out of place. There were no idlers, no idling places. To idle meant to sit in lonely boredom.
Barney and his son were busy all day--they grudged the half-hour of that precious time of theirs which they spent at luncheon. Nelly, too, had her work--some sort of a school she was running, away off somewhere in the poorer part of the town. He was sensitive enough soon to discover, in spite of her courtesy, that he was interrupting her routine seriously and was in the way to becoming a burden. He saw as much of her as he dared--she had for him a charm that became the more difficult to resist as his hope of winning her decreased. He relieved her of himself during her busy hours so tactfully that she did not suspect him of penetrating what she honestly tried to conceal.
He betook himself to the club. It was usually deserted; if a man did enter, he raced through and away as if pursued by demons; at luncheon all ate as if struggling for a prize offered to him who should chew the least, swallow the fastest, and finish the soonest. He called on the women he met--they were out or just going out, or just coming in to busy themselves at home.
In New York, Boston, Washington he had thought the leisure class a lame imitation of the European class of industrious, experienced idlers, had found it small and peculiarly unsatisfactory because its men were inferior to its women in numbers and especially in brains. But here--there wasn’t a pretence of a leisure class except the loungers in the parks; and they were threatening, so it was said, to organize and do all sorts of dreadful things if they weren’t given something to do. “This is a howling wilderness,” he said to himself. “I should be better off in a desert. These lunatics make my head swim.”
Wherever he went, all seemed possessed of and pursued by fever-demons. If it was a dinner, the diners were eager to despatch it. The courses were served swiftly, the waiters snatching one’s plate if he for a second ceased the machine-like lifting of food; the conversation was nervous and in the shrill tones of acute mental excitement. Words were cut short and slapped together almost incoherently. Sentences were left unfinished, the speaker leaping on to another sentence or submerged by the breaking of the flimsy speech-dam of the person he was addressing. Often all were talking at the same time. “Surely you can listen as you talk,” said a woman to whom he complained. “Think how much time it saves!”