Sylvia's Marriage, by Upton Sinclair.

The story is told by Mary Abbott, about Sylvia and about herself. Sylvia is from Society, while Mary has lived hard working farmer's life.

"I was to Sylvia a new and miraculous thing, a self-made woman. I must have been the first "common" person she had ever known intimately. She had seen us afar off, and wondered vaguely about us, consoling herself with the reflection that we probably did not know enough to be unhappy over our sad lot in life. But here I was, actually a soul like herself; and it happened that I knew more than she did, and of things she desperately needed to know. So all the luxury, power and prestige that had been given to Sylvia Castleman seemed as nothing beside Mary Abbott, with her modern attitude and her common-sense."

"I was working eighteen hours a day, more than half of it by lamp-light, in the darkness of our Northern winters. When the accident came, I had been doing the cooking for half a dozen men, who were getting in the wheat upon which our future depended. I fell in my tracks, and lost my child; yet I sat still and white while the men ate supper, and afterwards I washed up the dishes. Such was my life in those days; and I can see before me the face of horror with which Sylvia listened to the story. But these things are common in the experience of women who live upon pioneer farms, and toil as the slave-woman has toiled since civilization began.

"We won out, and my husband made money. I centred my energies upon getting school-time for my children; and because I had resolved that they should not grow ahead of me, I sat up at night, and studied their books. When the oldest boy was ready for high-school, we moved to a town, where my husband had bought a granary business. By that time I had become a physical wreck, with a list of ailments too painful to describe. But I still had my craving for knowledge, and my illness was my salvation, in a way—it got me a hired girl, and time to patronize the free library."

"I went to a college town with my three children, and when they were graduated, having meantime made sure that I could never do anything but torment my husband, I set about getting a divorce."

"I gave up everything, and went out into the world at the age of forty-five to earn my own living. My children soon married, and I would not be a burden to them; so I came East for a while, and settled down quite unexpectedly into a place as a field-worker for a child-labour committee.

"You may think that a woman so situated would not have been apt to meet Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver, née Castleman, and to be chosen for her bosom friend; but that would only be because you do not know the modern world."

The publications of the Metropolis knew little of the South, and had no clue that the bride had no reason to feel as exalted due to her bridegroom's wealthy status as they expected her to do.

"What the editors knew about Castleman Hall was that they wired for pictures, and a man was sent from the nearest city to "snap" this unknown beauty; whereupon her father chased the presumptuous photographer and smashed his camera with a cane. So, of course, when Sylvia stepped out of the train in New York, there was a whole battery of cameras awaiting her, and all the city beheld her image the next day."
................................................................................................


Mary Abbott was curious to see her, and joined the crowd outside the church, thus meeting Claire Lapage.

"Claire said to me, not once, but a dozen times, "He'll come back to me. She'll never be able to make him happy." And so I pictured Sylvia upon her honeymoon, followed by an invisible ghost whose voice she would never hear, whose name she would never know. All that van Tuiver had learned from Claire, the sensuality, the ennin, the contempt for woman—it would rise to torment and terrify his bride, and turn her life to bitterness. And then beyond this, deeps upon deeps, to which my imagination did not go—and of which the Frenchwoman, with all her freedom of tongue, gave me no more than a hint which I could not comprehend."

Claire beseeched Mary to replace as a chaperone the elderly companion she had lost, and Mary was so persuaded, trying to help her; in her free time she visited poor at home and in factories, and began to be known for her speeches.

"Mrs. Roland Allison was one of the comfortable in body who had begun to feel uncomfortable in mind. I had happened to meet her at the settlement, and tell her what I had seen in the glass factories; whereupon she made up her mind that everybody she knew must hear me talk, and to that end gave a reception at her Madison Avenue home."

Sylvia talked to Mary afterwards.

""Our negroes at least can steal enough to eat," she said.

"I smiled. Then—since one has but a moment or two to get in one's work in these social affairs, and so has to learn to thrust quickly: "You have timber-workers in Louisiana, steel-workers in Alabama. You have tobacco-factories, canning-factories, cotton-mills—have you been to any of them to see how the people live?""

""Take Mrs. Abbott away with you," said the energetic hostess, to Sylvia; and before I quite understood what was happening, I had received and accepted an invitation to drive in the park with Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver. In her role of dea ex machina the hostess extricated me from the other guests, and soon I was established in a big new motor, gliding up Madison Avenue as swiftly and silently as a cloud-shadow over the fields. As I write the words there lies upon my table a Socialist paper with one of Will Dyson's vivid cartoons, representing two ladies of the great world at a reception. Says the first, "These social movements are becoming quite worth while!" "Yes, indeed," says the other. "One meets such good society!""
................................................................................................


Mary wanted Sylvia to speak to the legislature, and Sylvia thought speaking was men's role.

"We talked of Suffrage for a while, and I spoke about the lives of women on lonely farms—how they give their youth and health to their husband's struggle, yet have no money partnership which they can enforce in case of necessity. "But surely," cried Sylvia, "you don't want to make divorce more easy!"

""I want to make the conditions of it fair to women," I said.

""But then more women will get it! And there are so many divorced women now! Papa says that divorce is a greater menace than Socialism!""

"She spoke of Suffrage in England, where women were just beginning to make public disturbances. Surely I did not approve of their leaving their homes for such purposes as that! As tactfully as I could, I suggested that conditions in England were peculiar. There was, for example, the quaint old law which permitted a husband to beat his wife subject to certain restrictions. Would an American woman submit to such a law? There was the law which made it impossible for a woman to divorce her husband for infidelity, unless accompanied by desertion or cruelty. Surely not even her father would consider that a decent arrangement! I mentioned a recent decision of the highest court in the land, that a man who brought his mistress to live in his home, and compelled his wife to wait upon her, was not committing cruelty within the meaning of the English law. I heard Sylvia's exclamation of horror, and met her stare of incredulity; and then suddenly I thought of Claire, and a little chill ran over me. It was a difficult hour, in more ways than one, that of my first talk with Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver!

"I soon made the discovery that, childish as her ignorance was, there was no prejudice in it. If you brought her a fact, she did not say that it was too terrible to be true, or that the Bible said otherwise, or that it was indecent to know about it. Nor, when you met her next, did you discover that she had forgotten it. On the contrary, you discovered that she had followed it to its remote consequences, and was ready with a score of questions as to these. I remember saying to myself, that first automobile ride: "If this girl goes on thinking, she will get into trouble! She will have to stop, for the sake of others!"

""You must meet my husband some time," she said; and added, "I'll have to see my engagement-book. I have so much to do, I never know when I have a moment free."

""You must find it interesting," I ventured.

""I did, for a while; but I've begun to get tired of so much going about. For the most part I meet the same people, and I've found out what they have to say.""

They talked of society, and of beauty.

"Most of the beautiful women I've known make a sort of profession of it—they live to shine and be looked at. "And you don't enjoy that?" I asked.

""It restricts one's life. Men expect it of you, they resent your having any other interest.""
................................................................................................


"I do not know how much of her I have been able to give. I have told of our first talk—but words are so cold and dead! I stop and ask: What there is, in all nature, that has given me the same feeling? I remember how I watched the dragon-fly emerging from its chrysalis. It is soft and green and tender; it clings to a branch and dries its wings in the sun, and when the miracle is completed, there for a brief space it poises, shimmering with a thousand hues, quivering with its new-born ecstasy. And just so was Sylvia; a creature from some other world than ours, as yet unsoiled by the dust and heat of reality."

""Oden and Thor, these two thou knowest; Freya, the heavenly, knowest thou not.""
................................................................................................


That last quote goes deep in psyche of Upton Sinclair, who is aware enough to state it and recognise it, and simultaneously confident enough and humble enough to admit it. The World's End series has Lanny's world permeate with it, right up to when WWII intrudes, which is when the transformation, from the world of beauty and leisure and art and fashion, to one of necessity of fighting horrors, inflicted by injustice of fascism and nazism, overtakes life, and never recovers, however much Lanny attempt to keep up with love and art; was the giving up French Riviera and Beauty and Bienvenu a conscious choice Upton Sinclair made for Lanny, without saying so?

For his work could have been done for ever from Sept Chenes for much less cost and upheaval, instead of scouting a house in New Jersey and transferring allegiance to the Robbie and Esther Budds to the extent of making Newcastle the family vacation home, giving up not only living at Bienvenu but visiting as well. What's more, he repeatedly mentions Beauty asking about her grandson, but has neither brought her to visit his home nor brought his family to Bienvenu, and for that matter not even attended the second wedding of his sister Marceline, despite the fact that she endangered her own life to save his, and quite consciously so too!

In comparison, his transfer of heart from the Robin family to the Pomeroy-Nielson as a choice of Frances to marry, despite his accusing Irma of a thinly veiled antisemitism for being displeased that Frances and little Johannes were growing up together at Bienvenu and were attached, seems smaller.

Was this author ever aware of his own deep, concrete prejudices - against Jews and for West Europe, against women and pro biblically against other cultures?
................................................................................................


"She referred to her experiences abroad. She had not liked Europe—being quite frankly a provincial person. To Castleman County a foreigner was a strange, dark person who mixed up his consonants, and was under suspicion of being a fiddler or an opera-singer. The people she had met under her husband's charge had been socially indubitable, but still, they were foreigners, and Sylvia could never really be sure what they meant."

"There was the Duke of Something in Rome, for example, a melancholy young man, with whom she had coquetted, as she did, in her merry fashion, with every man she met. Being married, she had taken it for granted that she might be as winsome as she chose; but the young Italian had misunderstood the game, and had whispered words of serious import, which had so horrified Sylvia that she flew to her husband and told him the story—begging him incidentally not to horse-whip the fellow. In reply it had to be explained to her she had laid herself liable to the misadventure. The ladies of the Italian aristocracy were severe and formal, and Sylvia had no right to expect an ardent young duke to understand her native wildness."

"Then they had come to London, a dismal, damp city where you "never saw the sun, and when you did see it it looked like a poached egg"; where you had to learn to eat fish with the help of a knife, and where you might speak of bitches, but must never on any account speak of your stomach. They went for a week-end to "Hazelhurst," the home of the Dowager Duchess of Danbury, whose son van Tuiver, had entertained in America, and who, in the son's absence, claimed the right to repay the debt.

"And then there was the Honourable Reginald Annersley, the youngest son of the family, home from Eton on vacation. The Honourable Reginald was twelve years of age, undersized and ill-nourished. ("They feed them badly," his mother had explained, "an' the teachin's no good either, but it's a school for gentlemen.") ... He spoke of his brother, the duke, who had gone off shooting seals somewhere. 'The jolly rotter has nothing to do but spend his money; but we younger sons have to work like dogs when we grow up!' I asked what he'd do, and he said 'I suppose there's nothin' but the church. It's a beastly bore, but you do get a livin' out of it.'

""That was too much for me," said Sylvia. "I proceeded to tell the poor, blasé infant about my childhood; how my sister Celeste and I had caught half-tamed horses and galloped about the pasture on them, when we were so small that our little fat legs stuck out horizontally; how we had given ourselves convulsions in the green apple orchard, and had to be spanked every day before we had our hair combed. I told how we heard a war-story about a "train of gunpowder," and proceeded to lay such a train about the attic of Castleman Hall, and set fire to it. I might have spent the afternoon teaching the future churchman how to be a boy, if I hadn't suddenly caught a glimpse of my husband's face!"

"Sylvia's was the true aristocratic attitude towards the rest of the world. It could never have occurred to her to imagine that anywhere upon the whole earth there were people superior to the Castlemans of Castleman County. ... The trouble was that van Tuiver was not clever enough to realise this,"

"How had Sylvia come to make this marriage? She was not happy with him; keen psychologist that she was, she must have foreseen that she would not be happy with him. Had she deliberately sacrificed herself, because of the good she imagined she could do to her family?

"I was beginning to believe this. Irritated as she was by the solemn snobberies of van Tuiver's world, it was none the less true that she believed in money; she believed in it with a faith which appalled me as I came to realise it. Everybody had to have money; the social graces, the aristocratic virtues were impossible without it. The rich needed it—even the poor needed it! Could it be that the proud Castlemans of Castleman County had needed it also?"
................................................................................................


Mary answered Sylvia's questions about how she could help poor, making an education in economics out of it, which eventually had Sylvia proposing state production, and Mary informing her this was socialism; Sylvia remarked that Mary was a socialist.

" ... what terrifies her class is not our economic programme, it is our threat of slave-rebellion."

Her bringing up in Mississippi as a lady -

"Sylvia had to have a special phaeton to drive, a special horse to ride, special roses which no one else was allowed to wear."

The two became close friends.

"Proud as she was, she was lonely, and in need of some one to open her eager mind to. Who was there safer to trust than this plain Western woman, who lived so far, both in reality and in ideas, from the great world of fashion?"
................................................................................................


There is a delightful drama when Mary introduced Sylvia to Mrs Frothingham, head of 'Frothingham's', a finishing school for daughters of rich, and Sylvia brought the two in her chauffeured car to Wall Street where Mrs Frothingham was giving one of her socialist speeches - and suddely Sylvia's husband, Douglas Van Tuiver, appeared, asking why she was there, and so on. Sylvia was equal to the occasion, coolly stating she'd like to hear Mrs Frothingham, who proceeded to address "Mr Millionaire". Shortly after, the husband simply ordered the chauffeur to back out, and got in; next day Mary visited Sylvia, since she'd sent a note by a messenger.

"I waited for her to add what news she chose.

""It seems," she said, "that my husband has a cousin, a pupil of Mrs. Frothingham's. You can imagine!"

""I can imagine Mrs. Frothingham may lose a pupil."

""No; my husband says his Uncle Archibald always was a fool. But how can anyone be so narrow! He seemed to take Mrs. Frothingham as a personal affront."

"This was the most definite bit of vexation against her husband that she had ever let me see. I decided to turn it into a jest.

""Mrs. Frothingham will be glad to know she was understood," I said."
................................................................................................


Sylvia and Mary began to open up, speak more of their lives and husband's, and Mary realised Sylvia knew very little of life, especially about physical relations and darker side of life. She didn't know about women having to sell themselves due to poverty and couldn't believe it. Mary on the other hand saw the life of rich who had no work, which was new to Sylvia - men ran plantations where she came from. Mary began to know Douglas Van Tuiver through Sylvia.

"Douglas van Tuiver spent his money upon a definite system: whatever went to the maintaining of his social position, whatever added to the glory, prestige and power of the van Tuiver name—that money was well-spent; while money spent to any other end was money wasted—and this included all ideas and "causes." And when the master of the house knew that his money was being wasted, it troubled him.

""It wasn't until after I married him that I realized how idle his life is," she remarked. "At home all the men have something to do, running their plantations, or getting elected to some office. But Douglas never does anything that I can possibly think is useful.""

Here this couple seems like an early prototype for Irma and her set later in the World's End series. Even more, Sylvia is like a younger Lanny, while her husband Douglas is like Irma after rescuing the Robin family, grimly set in her ways.
................................................................................................


Mary took Sylvia on a tour of child labour horrors - tenements and factories - since the work mary did needed Sylvia's help when it came to legislature.

"She was Dante, and I was Virgil, our inferno was an endless procession of tortured faces—faces of women, haggard and mournful, faces of little children, starved and stunted, dulled and dumb. Several times we stopped to talk with these people—one little Jewess girl I knew whose three tiny sisters had been roasted alive in a sweatshop fire. This child had jumped from a fourth-story window, and been miraculously caught by a fireman. She said that some man had started the fire, and been caught, but the police had let him get away. So I had to explain to Sylvia that curious bye-product (sic) of the profit system known as the "Arson Trust." ities estimated that incendiarism was responsible for the destruction of a quarter of a billion dollars worth of property in America every year. So, of course, the business of starting fires was a paying one, and the "fire-bug," like the "cadet" and the dive-keeper, was a part of the "system." So it was quite a possible thing that the man who had burned up this little girl's three sisters might have been allowed to escape."

To the horror of the two, it turned out that several of those tenements and factories were part of the real estate that was primarily foundation of the van Tuiver wealth. Mary explained the connections between legislature and political contribution.
................................................................................................


Sylvia asked Mary to meet her at a hotel where she had an appointment for tea, and Mary met Claire Lapage while waiting for Sylvia in her sight; to avoid Sylvia approach her in public while she was with Claire, Mary took Claire to another hotel for tea. Claire spoke of having met Douglas at a party.

""Claire, let him alone. Give them a chance to be happy."

""Why should I?" she demanded, in a voice of hostility.

""She never harmed you," I said. I knew I was being foolish, but I would do what I could.

""She took him away from me, didn't she?" And Claire's eyes were suddenly alight with the hatred of her outcast class. "Why did she get him? Why is she Mrs. van Tuiver, and I nobody? Because her father was rich, because she had power and position, while I had to scratch for myself in the world. Is that true, or isn't it?"

"I could not deny that it might be part of the truth.

""But they're married now," I said, "and he loves her."

""He loves me, too. And I love him still, in spite of the way he's treated me. He's the only man I ever really loved. Do you think I'm going off and hide in a hole, while she spends his money and plays the princess up and down the Avenue? Not much!""

Mary met Sylvia, who was planning to relocate to Florida Keys, where Douglas had a house, amongst many others in various places; she was expecting, so the real reason for her going wouldn't be a public scandal, which was her aversion now to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on parties while poor children suffered as she'd seen.
................................................................................................


Sylvia wrote to Mary, beautiful letters about Florida. She tried to change her husband's thinking by reading, but he had exactly the same idea in the opposite direction, and her aunt who was visiting noticed their differences and chided her for thinking; she set Sylvia sewing as a cure. Sylvia discussed women's question with Douglas.

"He says he does not think that women are inferior to men, only that they are different; the mistake is for them to try to become like men. It is the old proposition of 'charm,' you see. I put that to him, and he admitted that he did like to be 'charmed.'

""I said, 'You wouldn't, if you knew as much about the process as I do.'

""'Why not?' he asked.

""'Because, it's not an honest process. It's not a straight way for one sex to deal with the other.'

""He asked what I meant by that; but then, remembering the cautions of my great-aunt, I laughed. 'If you are going to compel me to use the process, you can hardly expect me to tell you the secret of it.'

""'Then there's no use trying to talk,' he said.

""'Ah, but there is!' I exclaimed. 'You admit that I have 'charm'—dozens of other men admitted it. And so it ought to count for something if I declare that I know it's not an honest thing—that it depends upon trickery, and appeals to the worst qualities in a man. For instance, his vanity. "Flatter him," Lady Dee used to say. "He'll swallow it." And he will—I never knew a man to refuse a compliment in my life. His love of domination. "If you want anything, make him think that he wants it!" His egotism. She had a bitter saying—I can hear the very tones of her voice: "When in doubt, talk about HIM." That is what is called "charm"!'

""'I don't seem to feel it,' he said.

""' No, because now you are behind the scenes. But when you were in front, you felt it, you can't deny. And you would feel it again, any time I chose to use it. But I want to know if there is not some honest way a woman can interest a man. The question really comes to this—Can a man love a woman for what she really is?'

""'I should say,' he said, 'that it depends upon the woman.'

""I admitted this was a plausible answer. 'But you loved me, when I made myself a mystery to you. But now that I am honest with you, you have made it clear that you don't like it, that you won't have it. And that is the problem that women have to face. It is a fact that the women of our family have always ruled the men; but they've done it by indirection—nobody ever thought seriously of "women's rights" in Castleman County. But you see, women have rights; and somehow or other they will fool the men, or else the men must give up the idea that they are the superior sex, and have the right, or the ability, to rule women.'

""Then I saw how little he had followed me. 'There has to be a head to the family,' he said.

""I answered, 'There have been cases in history of a king and queen ruling together, and getting along very well. Why not the same thing in a family?'

""'That's all right, so far as the things of the family are concerned. But such affairs as business and politics are in the sphere of men; and women cannot meddle in them without losing their best qualities as women.'

""And so there we were. I won't repeat his arguments, for doubtless you have read enough anti-suffrage literature. The thing I noticed was that if I was very tactful and patient, I could apparently carry him along with me; but when the matter came up again, I would discover that he was back where he had been before. A woman must accept the guidance of a man; she must take the man's word for the things that he understands."

"'But suppose the man is wrong?' I said; and there we stopped—there we shall stop always, I begin to fear. I agree with him that woman should obey man—so long as man is right!""

She wrote about the doctor.

""Here is this young man; he thinks he is a scientist, he rather prides himself upon being cold-blooded; yet a cunning woman could twist him round her finger. He had an unhappy love-affair when he was young, so he confided to me; and now, in his need and loneliness, a beautiful woman is transformed into something supernatural in his imagination—she is like a shimmering soap-bubble, that he blows with his own breath. I know that I could never get him to see the real truth about me; I might tell him that I have let myself be tied up in a golden net—but he would only marvel at my spirituality. Oh, the women I have seen trading upon the credulity of men! And when I think how I did this myself! If men were wise, they would give us the vote, and a share in the world's work—anything that would bring us out into the light of day, and break the spell of mystery that hangs round us!"
................................................................................................


Towards final months of Sylvia's pregnancy, Douglas was restless, and Sylvia persuaded him to go alone while she was safe in Florida in care of her aunt and the doctor and the warmth. She asked Mary to visit, and Mary dropped in on Claire before doing so, discovering that Claire had reconnected with Douglas, although there was Larry, a blond married stockbroker worried about venereal disease from infidelity.

Mary discovered, by Claire declaring it casually, that Claire had had several diseases and some surgical operations as well; when confronted with the possibility of Sylvia's child being affected, she flew into a passion and said, why shouldn't she pay for taking Douglas away? That she should have had a chance to refuse to marry Douglas, she didnt admit.

Mary went to see the doctor in N.Y. who was to go to Florida to attend to Sylvia, and inform him, without naming Claire, before she went to see Sylvia. The baby was born already when she arrived, and Mary stopped them in the process of cancelling the visit from Dr Overton from N.Y., and got them to get nitrate of silver from Key West, as well as get an eye specialist from Atlanta for the baby.
................................................................................................


Douglas Van Tuiver telegraphed Dr Perrin to use tact, and the aunt went after Mary about not telling Sylvia, even as the baby was being treated by the specialist and Dr Overton.

""My dear Mrs. Tuis, what do you imagine you know about the prevalence of gonorrhea? Consider just one fact—that I heard a college professor state publicly that in his opinion eighty-five per cent. of the men students at his university were infected with some venereal disease. And that is the pick of our young manhood—the sons of our aristocracy!"

""Oh, that can't be!" she exclaimed. "People would know of it!

""Who are 'people'? The boys in your family know of it—if you could get them to tell you. My two sons studied at a State university, and they would bring me home what they heard—the gossip, the slang, the horrible obscenity. Fourteen fellows in one dormitory using the same bathroom—and on the wall you saw a row of fourteen syringes! And they told that on themselves, it was the joke of the campus. They call the disease a 'dose'; and a man's not supposed to be worthy the respect of his fellows until he's had his 'dose'—the sensible thing is to get several, till he can't get any more. They think it's 'no worse than a bad cold'; that's the idea they get from the 'clap-doctors,' and the women of the street who educate our sons in sex matters."

""That is what is going on among our boys," I said. "The Castleman boys, the Chilton boys! It's going on in every fraternity house, every 'prep school' dormitory in America. And the parents refuse to know, just as you do!"

""But what could I possibly do, Mrs. Abbott?"

""I don't know, Mrs. Tuis. What I am going to do is to teach the young girls."

"She whispered, aghast, "You would rob the young girls of their innocence. Why, with their souls full of these ideas their faces would soon be as hard—oh, you horrify me!"

""My daughter's face is not hard," I said. "And I taught her. Stop and think, Mrs. Tuis—ten thousand blind children every year! A hundred thousand women under the surgeon's knife! Millions of women going to pieces with slowly creeping diseases of which they never hear the names! I say, let us cry this from the housetops, until every woman knows—and until every man knows that she knows, and that unless he can prove that he is clean he will lose her! That is the remedy, Mrs. Tuis!""
................................................................................................


Mary met Douglas and presented an ultimatumabout telling Sylvia himself, but meanwhile events raced, and Sylvia overheard the nurses; she locked herself and asked for Mary. The two Southern doctors met Mary and Douglas ahead of their arrival.

"Dr. Perrin took command once more. "Our patient has asked for you, and she looks to you for guidance. You must put aside your own convictions and think of her health. You are the only person who can calm her, and surely it is your duty to do so!""

Notice the typical sleight of argument, presenting a fact and a conclusion with concealing the chain connecting them. Here, as often in most cases, the chain is "you must obey us", remaining unsaid, and presenting a fait accompli of "You must put aside your own convictions", universally employed.

Mary was forced to return to N.Y. by orders of Douglas and watched by his servants to make sure she wouldn't remain on pier at Key West, without an opportunity to see Sylvia.

Douglas attempted to browbeat and dominate Sylvia with a combination of lies and halftruths, not admitting his own guilt but saying Dr Perrin had treated a negro woman and not sterilized his instruments, and said he wouldn'ttolerate any contact between Sylvia and Mary. Mrs Tuis, Sylvia's aunt, was next.

""My child! Come, do your duty! ... Women have to suffer, dear; we must not shirk our share of life's burdens.""

"The next day they were again in a dispute, for he had come to ask her word of honour that she would never see me again, and would give him my letters to be returned unopened. This last was what she had let her father do in the case of Frank Shirley; and she had become certain in her own mind that she had done wrong.

""I am quite aware," he said, quietly, "that these things are not calculated to preserve the peace of mind of a young mother. You are horrified when I tell you of them—yet you clamour for the right to have Mrs. Abbott tell you of them! I warn you, Sylvia—you have married a rich man, who is exposed to the attacks of cunning and unscrupulous enemies. You, as his wife, are exactly as much exposed—possibly even more so. Therefore when I see you entering into what I know to be a dangerous intimacy, I must have the right to say to you, This shall stop, and I tell you, there can never be any safety or peace of mind for either of us, so long as you attempt to deny me that right.""

Dr Gibson met Sylvia before leaving, to exculpate Douglas.

""The idea has been planted in your mind that your husband brought the trouble; and that idea is sure to stay there and fester. So it becomes necessary for someone to talk to you straight. Let me tell you that eight men out of ten have had this disease at some time in their lives; also that very few of them were cured of it when they thought they were. You have a cold: and then next month, you say the cold is gone. So it is, for practical purposes. But if I take a microscope, I find the germs of the cold still in your membranes, and I know that you can give a cold, and a bad cold, to some one else who is sensitive. It is true that you may go through all the rest of your life without ever being entirely rid of that cold. You understand me?"

""Yes," said Sylvia, in a low voice.

""I say eight out of ten. Estimates would differ. Some doctors would say seven out of ten—and some actual investigations have shown nine out of ten. And understand me, I don't mean bar-room loafers and roustabouts. I mean your brothers, if you have any, your cousins, your best friends, the men who came to make love to you, and whom you thought of marrying. ... Well, I've had this disease; I've had it, and nevertheless I've raised six fine, sturdy children. ... And now you think that over, and stop tormenting your poor husband!"
................................................................................................


Sylvia wrote to Mary to say she was going on the yacht to Scotland for a year, and would only be a mother; Douglas instructed his family lawyer in N.Y., Rossiter Torrance, to blackmail Claire to get Mary to obey their demands.

"Poor Claire! She passes here from this story. For years thereafter I used to catch a glimpse of her now and then, in the haunts of the birds of gorgeous plumage; but I never got a chance to speak to her, nor did she ever call on me again. So I do not know if Douglas van Tuiver still continues her eight thousand a year. All I can say is that when I saw her, her plumage was as gorgeous as ever, and its style duly certified to the world that it had not been held over from a previous season of prosperity. Twice I thought she had been drinking too much; but then—so had many of the other ladies with the little glasses of bright-coloured liquids before them."

After a year around the world on yacht, in Scotland and Mediterranean and Japan, Sylvia wired Mary asking her to meet at the pier.

""I am leaving my husband."

"Leaving your husband!" I stood, dumbfounded.

""Leaving him for ever, Mary."

""But—but——" I could not finish the sentence. My eyes moved to where he stood, calmly chatting with his friends.

""He insisted on coming back with me, to preserve appearances. He is terrified of the gossip. He is going all the way home, and then leave me."

""It's a long story," she added. "I must apologise for asking you to come here, where we can't talk. But I did it for an important reason. I can't make my husband really believe that I mean what I say; and you are my Declaration of Independence!" And she laughed, but a trifle wildly, and looking at her suddenly, I realized that she was keyed almost to the breaking point."

Sylvia visited Mary.

""Tell me why you are leaving him."

""Mary, because I don't love him. That's the one reason. I have thought it out—I have thought of little else for the last year. I have come to see that it is wrong for a woman to live with a man she does not love. It is the supreme crime a woman can commit."

""Ah, yes!" I said. "If you have got that far!"

""I have got that far. Other things have contributed, but they are not the real things—they might have been forgiven. The fact that he had this disease, and made my child blind——"

""Well, he said now the doctors were agreed there was no danger to either of us. We could take precautions and not have children. I could only plead that the whole subject was distressing to me. He had asked me to put off my problems till my baby was weaned; now I asked him to put off his. But that would not do, it seemed. He took to arguing with me. It was an unnatural way to live, and he could not endure it. I was a woman, and I couldn't understand this. It seemed utterly impossible to make him realize what I felt. I suppose he has always had what he wanted, and he simply does not know what it is to be denied. It wasn't only a physical thing, I think; it was an affront to his pride, a denial of his authority."

""He wanted to know how long I expected to withhold myself. I said, 'Until I have got this disease out of my mind, as well as out of my body; until I know that there is no possibility of either of us having it, to give to the other.' But then, after I had taken a little more time to think it over, I said, 'Douglas, I must be honest with you. I shall never be able to live with you again. It is no longer a question of your wishes or mine—it is a question of right or wrong. I do not love you. I know now that it can never under any circumstances be right for a woman to give herself in the intimacy of the sex-relation without love. When she does it, she is violating the deepest instinct of her nature, the very voice of God in her soul.'

""His reply was, 'Why didn't you know that before you married?'

""I answered, 'I did not know what marriage meant; and I let myself be persuaded by others.'

""'By your own mother!' he declared.

""I said, 'A mother who permits her daughter to commit such an offence is either a slave-dealer, or else a slave.' Of course, he thought I was out of my mind at that. He argued about the duties of marriage, the preserving of the home, wives submitting themselves to their husbands, and so on. He would not give me any peace——"

""I won't repeat all his protests. When he found that I was really going, he offered to take me in the yacht, but I wouldn't go in the yacht. I had got to be really afraid of him—sometimes, you know, his obstinacy seems to be abnormal, almost insane. So then he decided he would have to go in the steamer with me to preserve appearances. I had a letter saying that papa was not well, and he said that would serve for an excuse. He is going to Castleman County, and after he has stayed a week or so, he is going off on a hunting-trip, and not return."

""And will he do it?"

"I don't think he expects to do it at present. I feel sure he has the idea of starting mamma to quoting the Bible to me, and dragging me down with her tears. But I have done all I can to make clear to him that it will make no difference. I told him I would not say a word about my intentions at home until he had gone away, and that I expected the same silence from him. But, of course—"

""Dear Friend," she said, suddenly, "don't think I haven't seen his side of the case. I try to tell myself that I dealt with him frankly from the beginning. But then I ask was there ever a man I dealt with frankly? There was coquetry in the very clothes I wore! And now that we are so entangled, now that he loves me, what is my duty? I find I can't respect his love for me. A part of it is because my beauty fascinates him, but more of it seems to me just wounded vanity. I was the only woman who ever flouted him, and he has a kind of snobbery that made him think I must be something remarkable because of it. I talked that all out with him—yes, I've dragged him through all that humiliation. I wanted to make him see that he didn't really love me, that he only wanted to conquer me, to force me to admire him and submit to him. I want to be myself, and he wants to be himself—that has always been the issue between us."

""That is the issue in many unhappy marriages," I said.

""I've done a lot of thinking in the last year," she resumed—"about things generally, I mean. We American women think we are so free. That is because our husbands indulge us, give us money, and let us run about. But when it comes to real freedom—freedom of intellect and of character, English women are simply another kind of being from us. I met a cabinet minister's wife—he's a Conservative in everything, and she's an ardent suffragist; she not merely gives money, she makes speeches and has a public name. Yet they are friends, and have a happy home-life. Do you suppose my husband would consider such an arrangement?"

""There was the Honorable Betty Annersley—the sister of a chum of his. She was friendly with the militants, and I wanted to talk to her to understand what such women thought. Yet my husband tried to stop me from going to see her. And it's the same way with everything I try to do, that threatens to take me out of his power. He wanted me to accept the authority of the doctors as to any possible danger from venereal disease. When I got the books, and showed him what the doctors admitted about the question—the narrow margin of safety they allowed, the terrible chances they took—he was angry again."

"She stopped, seeing a question in my eyes. "I've been reading up on the subject," she explained. "I know it all now—the things I should have known before I married."

""How did you manage that?"

""I tried to get two of the doctors to give me something to read, but they wouldn't hear of it. I'd set myself crazy imagining things, it was no sort of stuff for a woman's mind. So in the end I took the bit in my teeth. I found a medical book store, and I went in and said: 'I am an American physician, and I want to see the latest works on venereal disease.' So the clerk took me to the shelves, and I picked out a couple of volumes."

""When Douglas found that I was reading these books he threatened to burn them. I told him 'There are more copies in the store, and I am determined to be educated on this subject.'"

""There were chapters on the subject of wives, how much they were not told, and why this was. So very quickly I began to see around my own experience. Douglas must have figured out that this would be so, for the end of the matter was an admission."

""You don't mean he confessed to you!"

"She smiled bitterly. "No," she said. "He brought Dr. Perrin to London to do it for him. Dr. Perrin said he had concluded I had best know that my husband had had some symptoms of the disease. He, the doctor, wished to tell me who was to blame for the attempt to deceive me. Douglas had been willing to admit the truth, but all the doctors had forbidden it. I must realise the fearful problem they had, and not blame them, and, above all I must not blame my husband, who had been in their hands in the matter."

""How stupid men are! As if that would excuse him!"

""I'm afraid I showed the little man how poor an impression he had made—both for himself and for his patron. But I had suffered all there was to suffer, and I was tired of pretending. I told him it would have been far better for them if they had told me the truth at the beginning."

""Ah, yes!" I said. "That is what I tried to make them see; but all I got for it was a sentence of deportation!""
................................................................................................


Sylvia went South to be with her family, to begin the process of separation.

"Sylvia realized at once that her husband was setting out upon a campaign to win her family to his side. He rode about the major's plantations, absorbing information about the bollweevil. He rode back to the house, and exchanged cigars, and listened to stories of the major's boyhood during the war. He went to call upon Bishop Chilton, and sat in his study, with its walls of faded black volumes on theology. Van Tuiver himself had had a Church of England tutor, and was a punctilious high churchman; but he listened respectfully to arguments for a simpler form of church organization, and took away a voluminous exposé of the fallacies of "Apostolic Succession." And then came Aunt Nannie, ambitious and alert as when she had helped the young millionaire to find a wife; and the young millionaire made the suggestion that Aunt Nannie's third daughter should not fail to visit Sylvia at Newport.

"There was no limit, apparently, to what he would do. He took Master Castleman Lysle upon his knee, and let him drop a valuable watch upon the floor. He got up early in the morning and went horse-back riding with Peggy and Maria. He took Celeste automobiling, and helped by his attentions to impress the cocksure young man with whom Celeste was in love. He won "Miss Margaret" by these attentions to all her children, and the patience with which he listened to accounts of the ailments which had afflicted the precious ones at various periods of their lives. To Sylvia, watching all these proceedings, it was as if he were binding himself to her with so many knots.

"She had come home with a longing to be quiet, to avoid seeing anyone. But this could not be, she discovered. There was gossip about the child's blindness, and the significance thereof; and to have gone into hiding would have meant an admission of the worst. The ladies of the family had prepared a grand "reception," at which all Castleman County was to come and gaze upon the happy mother. And then there was the monthly dance at the Country Club, where everybody would come, in the hope of seeing the royal pair. To Sylvia it was as if her mother and aunts were behind her every minute of the day, pushing her out into the world. "Go on, go on! Show yourself! Do not let people begin to talk!"

"She bore it for a couple of weeks; then she went to her cousin, Harley Chilton.

""Harley," she said, "my husband is anxious to go on a hunting-trip. Will you go with him?"

""When?" asked the boy.

""Right away; to-morrow or the next day."

""I'm game," said Harley.

"After which she went to her husband. "Douglas, it is time for you to go.""

Douglas argued.

""Douglas," she replied, "I know exactly what you have been doing. I have watched your change of character since you came here. You may be able to make my people so unhappy that I must be unhappy also. You see how deeply I love them, how I yield everything for love of them. But let me make it clear, I will not yield this. It was for their sake I went into this marriage, but I have come to see that it was wrong, and no power on earth can induce me to stay in it. My mind is made up—I will not live with a man I do not love. I will not even pretend to do it. Now do you understand me, Douglas?"

"He answered calmly, "I see no reason why I, your husband, should permit you to pursue this insane course. You propose to leave me; and the reason you give is one that would, if it were valid, break up two-thirds of the homes in the country. Your own family will stand by me in my effort to prevent your ruin."

""What do you expect to do?" she asked in a suppressed voice.

""I have to assume that my wife is insane; and I shall look after her till she comes to her senses."

"She sat watching him for a few moments, wondering at him. Then she said, "You are willing to stay on here, day after day, pursuing me in the only refuge I have. Well then, I shall not consider your feelings. I have a work to do here—and I think that when I begin it, you will want to be far away.""

He asked what she meant.

""Just this, Douglas—I do not intend to leave my sister unprotected as I was. I am going to tell her about Elaine. I am going to tell her all that she needs to know. It is bound to mean arguments with the old people, and in the end the whole family will be discussing the subject. I feel sure you will not care to be here under such circumstances.""
................................................................................................


At the end there is a scene with pain, delight and more, where a neighbour arranged Sylvia be confronted at a card party she couldn't decline, with the young man she'd been in love with and forced to break up with before her marriage, due to a false story circulated about him in innuendos. Upton Sinclair writes it with a combination of precise details of malicious neighbours and exemplary conduct of the targeted Sylvia.
................................................................................................
................................................................................................

The Metropolis, by Upton Sinclair.

The Metropolis was intended to be part of a trilogy, and if one read another part first, it isn't clear as a reader until one reads Brass Check when he mentions something about this one. It's still unclear after reading The Moneychangers if he ever did write the third part.

This work introduces the Montague family, consisting now of the mother and son and daughter Alice who is a debutante, relocate from Mississippi to metropolitan New York after the death of the father; he was in the union army, and had married a southern lady and stayed on in Mississippi, raising his family their on an estate. Allan Montague, the son, with the rest of the family, is put up at an expensive hotel by younger brother Oliver Montague who is entrenched in the society and facilitates their entry, by way of not only getting introductions but seeing to their wardrobes.

Detailed descriptions of the said wardrobes and those of the said society, their prices, their routines and houses, and generally extensive details of their lifestyles - activities, acquisitions,  expenditures - follow. They remain extravagant a century later, not only in content but the numbers, after inflation has meanwhile reduced value of currency, especially vis-a-vis gold.
....................................................................................................


"A phenomenon that had struck Montague immediately was the extraordinary freedom with which everybody in New York discussed everybody else. As a matter of fact, one seldom discussed anything else; and it made not the least difference, though the person were one of your set,—though he ate your bread and salt, and you ate his,—still you would amuse yourself by pouring forth the most painful and humiliating and terrifying things about him."
....................................................................................................


After a hunting party,

"Leaving the game to be gathered up in carts, they made their way home, and there the two victors received their prizes. The man's consisted of a shaving set in a case of solid gold, set with diamonds. Montague was simply stunned, for the thing could not have cost less than one or two thousand dollars. He could not persuade himself that he had a right to accept of such hospitality, which he could never hope to return. He was to realize in time that Robbie lived for the pleasure of thus humiliating his fellow-men."
....................................................................................................


When Montague first sees the clothes Oliver has got for Alice -

"But Oliver was not discussing questions of ethics; he was examining sets of tinted crepe de chine lingerie, and hand-woven hose of spun silk. There were boxes upon boxes, and bureau drawers and closet shelves already filled up with hand-embroidered and lace-trimmed creations-chemises and corset-covers, night-robes of "handkerchief linen" lawn, lace handkerchiefs and veils, corsets of French coutil, dressing-jackets of pale-coloured silks, and negligees of soft batistes, trimmed with Valenciennes lace, or even with fur.

""You must have put in a full day," he said.

""I never looked at so many things in my life," said Alice. "And Mr. Mann never stopped to ask the price of a thing."

""I didn't think to tell him to," said Oliver, laughing.

"Then the girl went in to dress—and Oliver faced about to find his brother sitting and staring hard at him.

""Tell me!" Montague exclaimed. "In God's name, what is all this to cost?"

""I don't know," said Oliver, impassively. "I haven't seen the bills. It'll be fifteen or twenty thousand, I guess."

"Montague's hands clenched involuntarily, and he sat rigid. "How long will it all last her?" he asked.

""Why," said the other, "when she gets enough, it'll last her until spring, of course—unless she goes South during the winter."

""How much is it going to take to dress her for a year?"

""I suppose thirty or forty thousand," was the reply. "I don't expect to keep count."

"Montague sat in silence.

""You don't want to shut her up and keep her at home, do you?" inquired his brother, at last.

""Do you mean that other women spend that much on clothes?" he demanded.

""Of course," said Oliver, "hundreds of them. Some spend fifty thousand—I know several who go over a hundred."

""It's monstrous!" Montague exclaimed.

""Fiddlesticks!" was the other's response. "Why, thousands of people live by it—wouldn't know anything else to do."

"Montague said nothing to that. "Can you afford to have Alice compete with such women indefinitely?" he asked.

""I have no idea of her doing it indefinitely," was Oliver's reply.

""I simply propose to give her a chance. When she's married, her bills will be paid by her husband."

""Oh," said the other, "then this layout is just for her to be exhibited in."

""You may say that," answered Oliver,—"if you want to be foolish. You know perfectly well that parents who launch their daughters in Society don't figure on keeping up the pace all their lifetimes."

""We hadn't thought of marrying Alice off," said Montague.

"To which his brother replied that the best physicians left all they could to nature.

""Suppose," said he, "that we just introduce her in the right set, and turn her loose and let her enjoy herself—and then cross the next bridge when we come to it?"

"Montague sat with knitted brows, pondering.' He was beginning to see a little daylight now. "Oliver," he asked suddenly, "are you sure the stakes in this game aren't too big?""
....................................................................................................


An invitation to visit -

"To decorate this mansion a real palace in the Punjab had been bought outright and plundered; there were mosaics of jade, and wonderful black marble, and rare woods, and strange and perplexing carvings."
....................................................................................................


Upton Sinclair on music -

"also a strange contrivance called a concerto, put together to enable the player to exhibit within a brief space the utmost possible variety of finger gymnastics. To learn to perform these feats one had to devote his whole lifetime to practising them, just like any circus acrobat; and so his mind became atrophied, and a naive and elemental vanity was all that was left to him."
....................................................................................................


Another invitation has Montague observe -

"The roof of this building had many gables, in the Queen Anne style; and from the midst of them shot up the tower, which was octagonal and solid, suggestive of the Normans. It was decorated with Christmas-wreaths in white stucco, and a few miscellaneous ornaments like the gilded tassels one sees upon plush curtains. Overtopping all of this was the dome of a Turkish mosque. Rising out of the dome was something that looked like a dove-cot; and out of this rose the slender white steeple of a Methodist country church. On top of that was a statue of Diana."
....................................................................................................


Here the subconscious prejudices of the author with his socialist conscious persona with a Southern family roots, show equally -

"Montague was rapidly getting used to things; he observed with a smile how easy it was to take for granted embroidered bed and table linen, and mural paintings, and private cars, and gold plate. At first it had seemed to him strange to be waited upon by a white woman, and by a white man quite unthinkable; but he was becoming accustomed to having silent and expressionless lackeys everywhere about him, attending to his slightest want. So he presumed that if he waited long enough, he might even get used to horses which had their tails cut off to stumps, and their manes to rows of bristles, and which had been taught to lift their feet in strange and eccentric ways, and were driven with burred bits in their mouths to torture them and make them step lively."
....................................................................................................


At a horse show -

"It was a great dress parade of society women. One who wished to play a proper part in it would spend at least ten thousand dollars upon her costumes for the week. It was necessary to have a different gown for the afternoon and evening of each day; and some, who were adepts at quick changes and were proud of it, would wear three or four a day, and so need a couple of dozen gowns for the show. And of course there had to be hats and shoes and gloves to match. There would be robes of priceless fur hung carelessly over the balcony to make a setting; and in the evening there would be pyrotechnical displays of jewels. Mrs. Virginia Landis wore a pair of simple pearl earrings, which she told the reporters had cost twenty thousand dollars; and there were two women who displayed four hundred thousand dollars' worth of diamonds—and each of them had hired a detective to hover about in the crowd and keep watch over her!

"Nor must one suppose, because the horse was an inconspicuous part of the show, that he was therefore an inexpensive part. One man was to be seen here driving a four-in-hand of black stallions which had cost forty thousand; there were other men who drove only one horse, and had paid forty thousand for that. Half a million was a moderate estimate of the cost of the "string" which some would exhibit. And of course these horses were useless, save for show purposes, and to breed other horses like them. Many of them never went out of their stables except for exercise upon a track; and the cumbrous and enormous; expensive coaches were never by any possibility used elsewhere—when they were taken from place to place they seldom went upon their own wheels."
....................................................................................................


Montague meets women, eligible and married -

"Miss Yvette possessed over a million dollars' worth of diamonds—the finest in the country, according to the newspapers; she had spent a hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars this year upon her clothes, and she gave long interviews, in which she set forth the fact that a woman nowadays could not really be well dressed upon less than a hundred thousand a year. It was Miss Yvette's boast that she had never ridden in a street-car in her life."
....................................................................................................


Alice meets an heiress, realising her own clothes are not much -

"Then Alice went on to describe the unpacking of fourteen trunks, which had just come up from the custom-house that day. Mrs. Virginia's couturiere had her photograph and her colouring (represented in actual paints) and a figure made up from exact measurements; and so every one of the garments would fit her perfectly. Each one came stuffed with tissue paper and held in place by a lattice-work of tape; and attached to each gown was a piece of the fabric, from which her shoemaker would make shoes or slippers. There were street-costumes and opera-wraps, robes de chambre and tea-gowns, reception-dresses, and wonderful ball and dinner gowns. Most of these latter were to be embroidered with jewellery before they were worn, and imitation jewels were sewn on, to show how the real ones were to be placed. These garments were made of real lace or Parisian embroidery, and the prices paid for them were almost impossible to credit. Some of them were made of lace so filmy that the women who made them had to sit in damp cellars, because the sunlight would dry the fine threads and they would break; a single yard of the lace represented forty days of labour. There was a pastel "batiste de soie" Pompadour robe, embroidered with cream silk flowers, which had cost one thousand dollars. There was a hat to go with it, which had cost a hundred and twenty-five, and shoes of grey antelope-skin, buckled with mother-of-pearl, which had cost forty. There was a gorgeous and intricate ball-dress of pale green chiffon satin, with orchids embroidered in oxidized silver, and a long court train, studded with diamonds—and this had cost six thousand dollars without the jewels! And there was an auto-coat which had cost three thousand; and an opera-wrap made in Leipsic, of white unborn baby lamb, lined with ermine, which had cost twelve thousand—with a thousand additional for a hat to match! Mrs. Landis thought nothing of paying thirty-five dollars for a lace handkerchief, or sixty dollars for a pair of spun silk hose, or two hundred dollars for a pearl and gold-handled parasol trimmed with cascades of chiffon, and made, like her hats, one for each gown."

Laura Hegan answers Alice-

"She said, 'You'll get used to it. Everybody you know will be doing it, and if you try to do differently they'll take offence; and you won't have the courage to do without friends. You'll be meaning every day to stop, but you never will, and you'll go on until you die.'""
....................................................................................................


More of society -

"Mrs. Alden herself had a cousin (whom she cordially hated) who had gotten a divorce from her husband and married her lover forthwith and had for this been ostracized by Society. Once when she came to some semi-public affair, fifty women had risen at once and left the room! She might have lived with her lover, both before and after the divorce, and every one might have known it, and no one would have cared; but the convenances declared that she should not marry him until a year had elapsed after the divorce."

He talks to Mrs Winnie Duval.

"I can remember when our girls wore pretty muslin gowns in summer, and sent them to wash; now they wear what they call lingerie gowns, dimity en princesse, with silk embroidery and real lace and ribbons, that cost a thousand dollars apiece and won't wash. Years ago when I gave a dinner, I invited a dozen friends, and my own chef cooked it and my own servants served it. Now I have to pay my steward ten thousand a year, and nothing that I have is good enough. I have to ask forty or fifty people, and I call in a caterer, and he brings everything of his own, and my servants go off and get drunk. You used to get a good dinner for ten dollars a plate, and fifteen was something special; but now you hear of dinners that cost a thousand a plate! And it's not enough to have beautiful flowers on the table—you have to have 'scenery'; there must be a rural landscape for a background, and goldfish in the finger-bowls, and five thousand dollars' worth of Florida orchids on the table, and floral favours of roses that cost a hundred and fifty dollars a dozen. I attended a dinner at the Waldorf last year that had cost fifty thousand dollars; and when I ask those people to see me, I have to give them as good as I got. The other day I paid a thousand dollars for a tablecloth!"

""Why do you do it?" asked Montague, abruptly.

""God knows," said the other; "I don't. I sometimes wonder myself. I guess it's because I've nothing else to do. It's like the story they tell about my brother—he was losing money in a gambling-place in Saratoga, and some one said to him, 'Davy, why do you go there—don't you know the game is crooked?' 'Of course it's crooked,' said he, 'but, damn it, it's the only game in town!'""

"I saw a woman here to-day that I never saw in my life before, and I heard her say she'd paid two thousand dollars for a lace handkerchief; and it might have been true, for I've been asked to pay ten thousand for a lace shawl at a bargain. It's a common enough thing to see a woman walking on Fifth Avenue with twenty or thirty thousand dollars' worth of furs on her. Fifty thousand is often paid for a coat of sable, and I know of one that cost two hundred thousand. I know women who have a dozen sets of furs—ermine, chinchilla, black fox, baby lamb, and mink and sable; and I know a man whose chauffeur quit him because he wouldn't buy him a ten-thousand-dollar fur coat! And once people used to pack their furs away and take care of them; but now they wear them about the street, or at the sea-shore, and you can fairly see them fade. Or else their cut goes out of fashion, and so they have to have new ones!""

Montague sees

"crystal cup for eighty thousand; an edition de luxe of the works of Dickens for a hundred thousand; a ruby, the size of a pigeon's egg, for three hundred thousand.

"Once a young man of fashion had come to the Waldorf and registered himself and "Miss Elsie Cochrane"; and when the clerk made the usual inquiries as to the relationship of the young lady, it transpired that Miss Elsie was a dog, arrayed in a prim little tea-gown, and requiring a room to herself. And then there was a tale of a cat which had inherited a life-pension from a forty-thousand-dollar estate; it had a two-floor apartment and several attendants, and sat at table and ate shrimps and Italian chestnuts, and had a velvet couch for naps, and a fur-lined basket for sleeping at night!"
....................................................................................................


At opera -

""People don't come to the Opera to listen to the music."

"This sounded like a joke, but it was not. To Society the Opera was a great state function, an exhibition of far more exclusiveness and magnificence than the Horse Show; and Society certainly had the right to say, for it owned the opera-house and ran it."

"Once there was a world-poet who devoted his life to trying to make the Opera an art; and in the battle with Society he all but starved to death. Now, after half a century, his genius had triumphed, and Society consented to sit for hours in darkness and listen to the domestic disputes of German gods and goddesses. But what Society really cared for was a play with beautiful costumes and scenery and dancing, and pretty songs to which one could listen while one talked; the story must be elemental and passionate, so that one could understand it in pantomime—say the tragic love of a beautiful and noble-minded courtesan for a gallant young man of fashion."

At another hunt -

"They drove eight or ten deer to water; and as they fired as many as twenty shots at one deer, they had quite a lively time."

Entertainment at a private home after the hunting party, which included a performance by a Broadway theatre troupe.

""The Kaliph of Kamskatka." It had no shred of a plot .... awful tragedy of full-grown men and women being compelled by the pressure of hunger to dress up and paint themselves, and then come out in public and dance, stamp, leap about, wring their hands, make faces, and otherwise be "lively.""

"After all, it would have been an error to say that there were no ideas in the play—there was one idea upon which all the interest of it was based; and Montague strove to analyze this idea and formulate it to himself. There are certain life principles-one might call them moral axioms—which are the result of the experience of countless ages of the human race, and upon the adherence to which the continuance of the race depends. And here was an audience by whom all these principles were—not questioned, nor yet disputed, nor yet denied—but to whom the denial was the axiom, something which it would be too banal to state flatly, but which it was elegant and witty to take for granted. In this audience there were elderly people, and married men and women, and young men and maidens; and a perfect gale of laughter swept through it at a story of a married woman whose lover had left her when he got married:—"She must have been heartbroken," said the leading lady.

""She was desperate," said the leading man, with a grin.

""What did she do?" asked the lady "Go and shoot herself?" "Worse than that," said the man.

""She, went back to her husband and had a baby!""

"Montague wondered, in an awestricken sort of way, what kind of human being it could be who had flourished the cane and made the grimaces in that play. Later on, when he came to know the "Tenderloin," he met this same actor, and he found that he had begun life as a little Irish "mick" who lived in a tenement, and whose mother stood at the head of the stairway and defended him with a rolling-pin against a policeman who was chasing him. He had discovered that he could make a living by his comical antics; but when he came home and told his mother that he had been offered twenty dollars a week by a show manager, she gave him a licking for lying to her. Now he was making three thousand dollars a week—more than the President of the United States and his Cabinet; but he was not happy, as he confided to Montague, because he did not know how to read, and this was a cause of perpetual humiliation. The secret desire of this little actor's heart was to play Shakespeare; he had "Hamlet" read to him, and pondered how to act it—all the time that he was flourishing his little cane and making his grimaces! He had chanced to be on the stage when a fire had broken out, and five or six hundred victims of greed were roasted to death. The actor had pleaded with the people to keep their seats, but all in vain; and all his life thereafter he went about with this vision of horror in his mind, and haunted by the passionate conviction that he had failed because of his lack of education—that if only he had been a man of culture, he would have been able to think of something to say to hold those terror-stricken people!
....................................................................................................


Montague met Hegan, whose daughter Laura he's met.

"It was very easy to chat with Hegan; and yet underneath, in the other's mind, there lurked a vague feeling of trepidation, as he realized that he was chatting with a hundred millions of dollars. Montague was new enough at the game to imagine that there ought to be something strange, some atmosphere of awe and mystery, about a man who was master of a dozen railroads and of the politics of half a dozen States. He was simple and very kindly in his manner, a plain man, interested in plain things. There was about him, as he talked, a trace of timidity, almost of apology, which Montague noticed and wondered at. It was only later, when he had time to think about it, that he realized that Hegan had begun as a farmer's boy in Texas, a "poor white"; and could it be that after all these years an instinct remained in him, so that whenever he met a gentleman of the old South he stood by with a little deference, seeming to beg pardon for his hundred millions of dollars?

"And yet there was the power of the man. Even chatting about horses, you felt it; you felt that there was a part of him which did not chat, but which sat behind and watched. And strangest of all, Montague found himself fancying that behind the face that smiled was another face, that did not smile, but that was grim and set. It was a strange face, with its broad, sweeping eyebrows and its drooping mouth; it haunted Montague and made him feel ill at ease."

"Montague sat alone and smoked and thought. The face still stayed with him; and now suddenly, in a burst of light, it came to him what it was: the face of a bird of prey—of the great wild, lonely eagle! You have seen it, perhaps, in a menagerie; sitting high up, submitting patiently, biding its time. But all the while the soul of the eagle is far away, ranging the wide spaces, ready for the lightning swoop, and the clutch with the cruel talons!"
....................................................................................................


Montague and Alice are invited to church with Mrs Winnie Duval and her cousin, Charles Carter.

"A most interesting place was St. Cecilia's. Church-going was another of the customs of men and women which Society had taken up, like the Opera, and made into a state function. Here was a magnificent temple, with carved marble and rare woods, and jewels gleaming decorously in a dim religious light. At the door of this edifice would halt the carriages of Society, and its wives and daughters would alight, rustling with new silk petticoats and starched and perfumed linen, each one a picture, exquisitely gowned and bonneted and gloved, and carrying a demure little prayer-book. Behind them followed the patient men, all in new frock-coats and shiny silk hats; the men of Society were always newly washed and shaved, newly groomed and gloved, but now they seemed to be more so—they were full of the atmosphere of Sunday. Alas for those unregenerate ones, the infidels and the heathen who scoff in outer darkness, and know not the delicious feeling of Sunday—the joy of being washed and starched and perfumed, and made to be clean and comfortable and good, after all the really dreadful wickedness of six days of fashionable life!—And afterward the parade upon the Avenue, with the congregations of several score additional churches, and such a show of stylish costumes that half the city came to see!

"Amid this exquisite assemblage at St. Cecilia's, the revolutionary doctrines of the Christian religion produced neither perplexity nor alarm. The chance investigator might have listened in dismay to solemn pronouncements of everlasting damnation, to statements about rich men and the eyes of needles, and the lilies of the field which did not spin. But the congregation of St. Cecilia's understood that these things were to be taken in a quixotic sense; sharing the view of the French marquis that the Almighty would think twice before damning a gentleman like him.

"One had heard these phrases ever since childhood, and one accepted them as a matter of course. After all, these doctrines had come from the lips of a divine being, whom it would be presumptuous in a mere mortal to attempt to imitate. Such points one could but leave to those whose business it was to interpret them—the doctors and dignitaries of the church; and when one met them, one's heart was set at rest—for they were not iconoclasts and alarmists, but gentlemen of culture and tact. "The bishop who presided in this metropolitan district was a stately personage, who moved in the best Society and belonged to the most exclusive clubs.

"The pews in St. Cecilia's were rented, and they were always in great demand; it was one of the customs of those who hung upon the fringe of Society to come every Sunday, and bow and smile, and hope against hope for some chance opening. The stranger who came was dependent upon hospitality; but there were soft-footed and tactful ushers, who would find one a seat, if one were a presentable person. The contingency of an unpresentable person seldom arose, for the proletariat did not swarm at the gates of St. Cecilia's. Out of its liberal income the church maintained a "mission" upon the East Side, where young curates wrestled with the natural depravity of the lower classes—meantime cultivating a soul-stirring tone, and waiting until they should be promoted to a real church. Society was becoming deferential to its religious guides, and would have been quite shocked at the idea that it exerted any pressure upon them; but the young curates were painfully aware of a process of unnatural selection, whereby those whose manner and cut of coat were not pleasing were left a long time in the slums.—On one occasion there had been an amusing blunder; a beautiful new church was built at Newport, and an eloquent young minister was installed, and all Society attended the opening service—and sat and listened in consternation to an arraignment of its own follies and vices! The next Sunday, needless to say, Society was not present; and within half a year the church was stranded, and had to be dismantled and sold!"

The author's personal prejudices here, disdain of a protestant for church of Rome.

"They had elaborate music at St. Cecilia's, so beautiful that Alice felt uncomfortable, and thought that it was perilously "high." At this Mrs. Winnie laughed, offering to take her to an afternoon service around the corner, where they had a full orchestra, and a harp, and opera music, and incense and genuflexions and confessionals. There were people, it seemed, who like to thrill themselves by dallying with the wickedness of "Romanism"; somewhat as a small boy tries to see how near he can walk to the edge of a cliff. The "father" at this church had a jewelled robe with a train so many yards long, and which had cost some incredible number of thousands of dollars; and every now and then he marched in a stately procession through the aisles, so that all the spectators might have a good look at it. There was a fierce controversy about these things in the church, and libraries of pamphlets were written, and intrigues and social wars were fought over them."

Upton Sinclair on NYC -

"The view up the river was magnificent, quite the finest which the city had to offer; but it was ruined by a hideous gas-tank, placed squarely in the middle of it. And this, again, was not inappropriate—it was typical of all the ways of the city. It was a city which had grown up by accident, with nobody to care about it or to help it; it was huge and ungainly, crude, uncomfortable, and grotesque. There was nowhere in it a beautiful sight upon which a man could rest his eyes, without having them tortured by something ugly near by. At the foot of the slope of the River Drive ran a hideous freight-railroad; and across the river the beautiful Palisades were being blown to pieces to make paving stone—and meantime were covered with advertisements of land-companies. And if there was a beautiful building, there, was sure to be a tobacco advertisement beside it; if there was a beautiful avenue, there were trucks and overworked horses toiling in the harness; if there was a beautiful park, it was filled with wretched, outcast men. Nowhere was any order or system—everything was struggling for itself, and jarring and clashing with everything else; and this broke the spell of power which the Titan city would otherwise have produced. It seemed like a monstrous heap of wasted energies; a mountain in perpetual labour, and producing an endless series of abortions. The men and women in it were wearing themselves out with toil; but there was a spell laid upon them, so that, struggle as they might, they accomplished nothing."

Montague is offered a lawsuit and goes to the city to find offices.

"It was a city caught in a trap. It was pent in at one end of a narrow little island. It had been no one's business to foresee that it must some day outgrow this space; now men were digging a score of tunnels to set it free, but they had not begun these until the pressure had become unendurable, and now it had reached its climax. In the financial district, land had been sold for as much as four dollars a square inch. Huge blocks of buildings shot up to the sky in a few months—fifteen, twenty, twenty-five stories of them, and with half a dozen stories hewn out of the solid rock beneath; there was to be one building of forty-two stories, six hundred and fifty feet in height. And between them were narrow chasms of streets, where the hurrying crowds overflowed the sidewalks. Yet other streets were filled with trucks and heavy vehicles, with electric cars creeping slowly along, and little swirls and eddies of people darting across here and there."

Here is Upton Sinclair at his best, except his prejudices show in describing clothing:-

"Each room in these endless mazes of buildings was a cell in a mighty brain; the telephone wires were nerves, and by the whole huge organism the thinking and willing of a continent were done. It was a noisy place to the physical ear; but to the ear of the mind it roared with the roaring of a thousand Niagaras. Here was the Stock Exchange, where the scales of trade were held before the eyes of the country. Here was the clearing-house, where hundreds of millions of dollars were exchanged every day. Here were the great banks, the reservoirs into which the streams of the country's wealth were poured. Here were the brains of the great railroad systems, of the telegraph and telephone systems, of mines and mills and factories. Here were the centres of the country's trade; in one place the shipping trade, in another the jewellery trade, the grocery trade, the leather trade. A little farther up town was the clothing district, where one might see the signs of more Hebrews than all Jerusalem had ever held; in yet other districts were the newspaper offices, and the centre of the magazine and book-publishing business of the whole country. One might climb to the top of one of the great "sky-scrapers," and gaze down upon a wilderness of houses, with roofs as innumerable as tree-tops, and people looking like tiny insects below. Or one might go out into the harbour late upon a winter afternoon, and see it as a city of a million lights, rising like an incantation from the sea. Round about it was an unbroken ring of docks, with ferry-boats and tugs darting everywhere, and vessels which had come from every port in the world, emptying their cargoes into the huge maw of the Metropolis."
....................................................................................................


Montague is told, by Major Thorne, about an invention of a coal shute by his grandson, a mechanical engineer, and Montague decides to discuss with Major Venable about investing in it, when he's invited to dinner by the latter.

"The Millionaires' was the show club of the city, the one which the ineffably rich had set apart for themselves. It was up by the park, in a magnificent white marble palace which had cost a million dollars. Montague felt that he had never really known the Major until he saw him here. The Major was excellent at all times and places, but in this club he became an edition de luxe of himself. He made his headquarters here, keeping his suite of rooms all the year round; and the atmosphere and surroundings of the place seemed to be a part of him."

After dinner, which Major Venable fussed over, Montague told him about the invention.

""The invention's no good," said the Major, promptly.

""How do you know?" asked the other.

""Because, if it had been, the companies would have taken it long ago, without paying him a cent."

""But he has it patented," said Montague.

""Patented hell!" replied the other. "What's a patent to lawyers of concerns of that size? They'd have taken it and had it in use from Maine to Texas; and when he sued, they'd have tied the case up in so many technicalities and quibbles that he couldn't have got to the end of it in ten years—and he'd have been ruined ten times over in the process."

""Is that really done?" asked Montague.

""Done!" exclaimed the Major. "It's done so often you might say it's the only thing that's done.—The people are probably trying to take you in with a fake."

""That couldn't possibly be so," responded the other. "The man is a friend—"

""I've found it an excellent rule never to do business with friends," said the Major, grimly.

""But listen," said Montague; and he argued long enough to convince his companion that that could not be the true explanation. Then the Major sat for a minute or two and pondered; and suddenly he exclaimed, "I have it! I see why they won't touch it!"

""What is it?"

""It's the coal companies! They're giving the steamships short weight, and they don't want the coal weighed truly!""

Montague hears about corruption in business practices.

"Montague's jaw had fallen. "What could Major Thorne do against such a combination?" he asked.

""I don't know," said the Major, shrugging his shoulders. "It's a case to take to a lawyer—one who knows the ropes. Hawkins over there would know what to tell you. I should imagine the thing he'd advise would be to call a strike of the men who handle the coal, and tie up the companies and bring them to terms."

""You're joking now!" exclaimed the other.

""Not at all," said the Major, laughing again. "It's done all the time. There's a building trust in this city, and the way it put all its rivals out of business was by having strikes called on their jobs."

""But how could it do that?"

""Easiest thing in the world. A labour leader is a man with a great deal of power, and a very small salary to live on. And even if he won't sell out—there are other ways. I could introduce you to a man right in this room who had a big strike on at an inconvenient time, and he had the president of the union trapped in a hotel with a woman, and the poor fellow gave in and called off the strike."'

""I should think the strikers might sometimes get out of hand," said Montague.

""Sometimes they do," smiled the other. "There is a regular procedure for that case. Then you hire detectives and start violence, and call out the militia and put the strike leaders into jail.""

Major Venable told Montague he was advising him as a friend who, now that he had money, needed to look out to keep it.

""Of course, if you want to look at the thing from the other side, why, then the invention is most ingenious, and trade is booming just now, and this is a great country, and merit is all you need in it—and everything else is just as it ought to be. It makes all the difference in the world, you know, whether a man is buying a horse or selling him!"

"Montague had observed with perplexity that such incendiary talk as this was one of the characteristics of people in these lofty altitudes. It was one of the liberties accorded to their station. Editors and bishops and statesmen and all the rest of their retainers had to believe in the respectabilities, even in the privacy of their clubs—the people's ears were getting terribly sharp these days! But among the real giants of business you might have thought yourself in a society of revolutionists; they would tear up the mountain tops and hurl them at each other. When one of these old war-horses once got started, he would tell tales of deviltry to appall the soul of the hardiest muck-rake man. It was always the other fellow, of course; but then, if you pinned your man down, and if he thought that he could trust you—he would acknowledge that he had sometimes fought the enemy with the enemy's own weapons!"

The two saw a bunch of guys come out of another room as theywere strolling to smoking room, and Montague asked about the powerful figure others are crowding around; it was Dan Waterman, Major Venable told him.

Upton Sinclair, in The Brass Check, candidly states that the character and doings of Dan Waterman are based factually on J. Pierpont Morgan.

""And think of another man I know of who spent a million dollars for a granite pier, so that he could land and see his mistress!—It's a fact, as sure as God made me! She was a well-known society woman, but she was poor, and he didn't dare to make her rich for fear of the scandal. So she had to live in a miserable fifty-thousand-dollar villa; and when other people's children would sneer at her children because they lived in a fifty-thousand-dollar villa, the answer would be, 'But you haven't got any pier!' And if you don't believe that—"

"But here suddenly the Major turned, and observed a boy who had brought him some cigars, and who was now standing near by, pretending to straighten out some newspapers upon the table. "Here, sir!" cried the Major, "what do you mean—listening to what I'm saying! Out of the room with you now, you rascal!""
..................................................................................................


Oliver Montague introduced Allan Montague to a very rich family, Jack Evans, who were from mining background simple folk and honest, intelligent without pretensions; they liked him after they met him and realised he wasn't out to get anything out of them. It was the elder daughter Anne who was desperate to get into Society, and had uprooted the family from Nevada and brought them to New York.

Oliver Montague got Allan Montague to play in Wall Street one day, on a tip, and consequently he was richer by quarter of a million dollars, having played with all his own money of sixty thousand dollars. Next, Mrs Winnie Duval insisted he play bridge at a house party.

"Mrs. Billy did not like Mrs. Winnie Duval; and the beginning of the conversation was her inquiry why he let that woman corrupt him. Then the good lady went on to tell him what bridge had come to be; how people played it on the trains all the way from New York to San Francisco; how they had tables in their autos, and played while they were touring over the world. "Once," said she, "I took a party to see the America's Cup races off Sandy Hook; and when we got back to the pier, some one called, 'Who won?' And the answer was, 'Mrs. Billy's ahead, but we're going on this evening.' I took a party of friends through the Mediterranean and up the Nile, and we passed Venice and Cairo and the Pyramids and the Suez Canal, and they never once looked up—they were playing bridge. And you think I'm joking, but I mean just literally what I say. I know a man who was travelling from New York to Philadelphia, and got into a game with some strangers, and rode all the way to Palm Beach to finish it!"

"Montague heard later of a well-known Society leader who was totally incapacitated that winter, from too much bridge at Newport; and she was passing the winter at Hot Springs and Palm Beach—and playing bridge there. They played it even in sanitariums, to which they had been driven by nervous breakdown. It was an occupation so exhausting to the physique of women that physicians came to know the symptoms of it, and before they diagnosed a case, they would ask, "Do you play bridge?" It had destroyed the last remnants of the Sabbath—it was a universal custom to have card-parties on that day.

"It was a very expensive game, as they played it in Society; one might easily win or lose several thousand dollars in an evening, and there were many who could not afford this. If one did not play, he would be dropped from the lists of those invited; and when one entered a game, etiquette required him to stay in until it was finished. So one heard of young girls who had pawned their family plate, or who had sold their honour, to pay their bills at the game; and all Society knew of one youth who had robbed his hostess of her jewels and pawned them, and then taken her the tickets—telling her that her guests had robbed him. There were women received in the best Society, who lived as adventuresses pure and simple, upon their skill at the game; hostesses would invite rich guests and fleece them. Montague never forgot the sense of amazement and dismay with which he listened while first Mrs. Winnie and then his brother warned him that he must avoid playing with a certain aristocratic dame whom he met in this most aristocratic household—because she was such a notorious cheater!"
....................................................................................................


Montague noticed that he was always partnered with Mrs Winnie Duval, and went for a long walk over hills in snow to escape; he came upon old Henry Grimes caught in an accident with his chauffeur dead, and assisted him, in the process meeting his niece and heir Laura Hegan again.

"It was the first time that he had ever had any occasion to talk with Miss Hegan. He noticed her gentle and caressing voice, with the least touch of the South in it; and he was glad to find that it was possible for her to talk without breaking the spell of her serene and noble beauty. Montague stayed as long as he had any right to stay.

"And all the way as he rode home he was thinking about Laura Hegan. Here for the first time was a woman whom he felt he should like to know; a woman with reserve and dignity, and some ideas in her life. And it was impossible for him to know her—because she was rich!

"There was no dodging this fact—Montague did not even try. He had met women with fortunes already, and he knew how they felt about themselves, and how the rest of the world felt about them. They might wish in their hearts to be something else besides the keepers of a treasure-chest, but their wishes were futile; the money went with them, and they had to defend it against all comers. Montague recalled one heiress after another—débutantes, some of them, exquisite and delicate as butterflies—but under the surface as hard as chain-armour. All their lives they had been trained to think of themselves as representing money, and of every one who came near them as adventurers seeking money. In every word they uttered, in every glance and motion, one might read this meaning. And then he thought of Laura Hegan, with the fortune she would inherit; and he pictured what her life must be—the toadies and parasites and flatterers who would lay siege to her—the scheming mammas and the affectionate sisters and cousins who would plot to gain her confidence! For a man who was poor, and who meant to keep his self-respect, was there any possible conclusion except that she was entirely unknowable to him?"
....................................................................................................


Alice Montague was introduced to society as a debutante at the Grand ball given by old Mrs Devon.

"The grand staircase and the hall and parlours had been turned into tropical gardens, with palms and trailing vines, and azaleas and roses, and great vases of scarlet poinsettia, with hundreds of lights glowing through them. (It was said that this ball had exhausted the flower supply of the country as far south as Atlanta.) And then in the reception room one came upon the little old lady, standing' beneath a bower of orchids. She was clad in a robe of royal purple trimmed with silver, and girdled about with an armour-plate of gems. If one might credit the papers, the diamonds that were worn at one of these balls were valued at twenty million dollars.

"There was a cotillion danced by two hundred gorgeously clad women and their partners—a scene so gay that one could only think of it as happening in a fairy legend, or some old romance of knighthood. Four sets of favours were given during this function, and jewels and objects of art were showered forth as if from a magician's wand.

"Then one went home, and realized that all this splendour, and the human effort which it represented, had been for nothing but a memory! Nor would he get the full meaning of it if he failed to realize that it was simply one of thousands—a pattern which every one there would strive to follow in some function of his own. It was a signal bell, which told the world that the "season" was open. It loosed the floodgates of extravagance, and the torrent of dissipation poured forth. From then on there would be a continuous round of gaieties; one might have three banquets every single night—for a dinner and two suppers was now the custom, at entertainments! And filling the rest of one's day were receptions and teas and musicales—a person might take his choice among a score of opportunities, and never leave the circle he met at Mrs. Devon's.

"The meaning of it all did not stop with the people who poured it forth; its effects were to be traced through the whole country. There were hordes of tradesmen and manufacturers who supplied what Society bought, and whose study it was to induce people to buy as much as possible. And so they devised what were called "fashions"—little eccentricities of cut and material, which made everything go out of date quickly. ...  And everywhere, in all classes of Society, men and women were starving their minds and hearts, and straining their energies to follow this phantom of fashion; the masses were kept poor because of it, and the youth and hope of the world was betrayed by it."

"The love of beauty, the impulse to hospitality, the joys of music and dancing and love—all these things had become simply means to the demonstration of money-power! The men were busy making more money—but their idle women had nothing in life save this mad race in display. So it had come about that the woman who could consume wealth most conspicuously—who was the most effective instrument for the destroying of the labour and the lives of other people—this was the woman who was most applauded and most noticed."

"The most appalling fact about Society was this utter blind materialism. Such expectations as Montague had brought with him had been derived from the literature of Europe; in a grand monde such as this, he expected to meet diplomats and statesmen, scientists and explorers, philosophers and poets and painters. But one never heard anything about such people in Society. It was a mark of eccentricity to be interested in intellectual affairs, and one might go about for weeks and not meet a person with an idea."

"Now and then some aspiring young matron of the "elite" would try to set up a salon after the fashion of the continent, and would gather a few feeble wits about her for a time. But for the most part the intellectual workers of the city held themselves severely aloof; and Society was left a little clique of people whose fortunes had become historic in a decade or two, and who got together in each other's palaces and gorged themselves, and gambled and gossiped about each other, and wove about their personalities a veil of awful and exclusive majesty."

"The most pitiful aspect of the whole thing to Montague was this "second generation" who were coming upon the scene, with their lives all poisoned in advance. No wrong which they could do to the world would ever equal the wrong which the world had done them, in permitting them to have money which they had not earned. They were cut off for ever from reality, and from the possibility of understanding life; they had big, healthy bodies, and they craved experience—and they had absolutely nothing to do. That was the real meaning of all this orgy of dissipation—this "social whirl" as it was called; it was the frantic chase of some new thrill, some excitement that would stir the senses of people who had nothing in the world to interest them. That was why they were building palaces, and flinging largesses of banquets and balls, and tearing about the country in automobiles, and travelling over the earth in steam yachts and private trains.

"And first and last, the lesson of their efforts was, that the chase was futile; the jaded nerves would not thrill. The most conspicuous fact about Society was its unutterable and agonizing boredom; of its great solemn functions the shop-girl would read with greedy envy, but the women who attended them would be half asleep behind their jewelled fans. It was typified to Montague by Mrs. Billy Alden's yachting party on the Nile; yawning in the face of the Sphinx, and playing bridge beneath the shadow of the pyramids—and counting the crocodiles and proposing to jump in by way of "changing the pain"!"

"There were still in Society a few men and women who had earned their money, and had some idea of the toil and suffering that it stood for; but when the third generation had taken possession, these would all be dead or forgotten, and there would no longer be any link to connect them with reality!"

"A little remark stayed in Montague's mind as expressing the attitude of Society toward such matters. Major Venable had chanced to remark jestingly that children were coming to understand so much nowadays that it was necessary for the ladies to be careful. To which Mrs. Vivie Patton answered, with a sudden access of seriousness: "I don't know—do you find that children have any morals? Mine haven't.""

"Montague sat in silence, thinking about it—wondering what would happen to the world when it had fallen under the sway of this generation of spoiled children, and had adopted altogether the religion of doing as one pleased.

"In the beginning people had simply done as they pleased spontaneously, and without thinking about it; but now, Montague discovered, the custom had spread to such an extent that it was developing a philosophy. There was springing up a new cult, whose devotees were planning to make over the world upon the plan of doing as one pleased. Because its members were wealthy, and able to command the talent of the world, the cult was developing an art, with a highly perfected technique, and a literature which was subtle and exquisite and alluring. Europe had had such a literature for a century, and England for a generation or two. And now America was having it, too!"

Montague attending a poetry reading, by invitation from Mrs Vivie Patton :

"He was a tall, slender youth with a white face and melancholy black eyes, and black locks falling in cascades about his ears; he sat in an Oriental corner, with a manuscript copied in tiny handwriting upon delicately scented "art paper," and tied with passionate purple ribbons. A young girl clad in white sat by his side and held a candle, while he read from this manuscript his unprinted (because unprintable) verses.

"And between the readings the young poet talked. He talked about himself and his work—apparently that was what he had come to talk about. His words flowed like a swift stream, limpid, sparkling, incessant; leaping from place to place—here, there, quick as the play of light upon the water. Montague laboured to follow the speaker's ideas, until he found his mind in a whirl and gave it up. Afterward, when he thought it over, he laughed at himself; for Strathcona's ideas were not serious things, having relationship to truth—they were epigrams put together to dazzle the hearer, studies in paradox, with as much relation to life as fireworks.

"The motto of this "school" of poets was that there was neither good nor evil, but that all things were "interesting." After listening to Strathcona for half an hour, one felt like hiding his head, and denying that he had ever thought of having any virtue; in a world where all things were uncertain, it was presumptuous even to pretend to know what virtue was. One could only be what one was; and did not that mean that one must do as one pleased?"

"Strathcona flouted the idea of a moral sense; but in reality he was quite dependent upon it—his recipe for making epigrams was to take what other people's moral sense made them respect, and identify it with something which their moral sense made them abhor. Thus, for instance, the tale which he told about one of the members of his set, who was a relative of a bishop. The great man had occasion to rebuke him for his profligate ways, declaring in the course of his lecture that he was living off the reputation of his father; to which the boy made the crushing rejoinder: "It may be bad to live off the reputation of one's father, but it's better than living off the reputation of God.""

"One must not forget, of course, that these young people were poets, and to that extent were protected from their own doctrines. They were interested, not in life, but in making pretty verses about life; there were some among them who lived as cheerful ascetics in garret rooms, and gave melodious expression to devilish emotions. But, on the other hand, for every poet, there were thousands who were not poets, but people to whom life was real. And these lived out the creed, and wrecked their lives; and with the aid of the poet's magic, the glamour of melody and the fire divine, they wrecked the lives with which they came into contact. The new generation of boys and girls were deriving their spiritual sustenance from the poetry of Baudelaire and Wilde; and rushing with the hot impulsiveness of youth into the dreadful traps which the traders in vice prepared for them. One's heart bled to see them, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, pursuing the hem of the Muse's robe in brothels and dens of infamy!"
....................................................................................................


Allan filed his suit for Hasbrook, and Oliver called, coming over in a terrible agitation to explain that hell was breaking due to this, since everyone in society was involved amongst the defendants. Oliver said he'd call and tell them Allan had no idea, which was true, but Allan stopped him to tell him he wasn't going to drop the case.

"There was a silence; and then the storm broke. Oliver knew his brother well enough to realize just how thoroughly he meant what he said; and so he got the full force of the shock all at once. He raved and swore and wrung his hands, and declaimed at his brother, saying that he had betrayed him, that he was ruining him—dumping himself and the whole family into the ditch. They would be jeered at and insulted—they would be blacklisted and thrown out of Society. Alice's career would be cut short—every door would be closed to her. His own career would die before it was born; he would never get into the clubs—he would be a pariah—he would be bankrupted and penniless. Again and again Oliver went over the situation, naming person after person who would be outraged, and describing what that person would do; there were the Wallings and the Venables and the Havens, the Vandams and the Todds and the Wymans—they were all one regiment, and Montague had flung a bomb into the centre of them!

"It was very terrible to him to see his brother's rage and despair; but he had seen his way clear through this matter, and he knew that there was no turning back for him.

""It is painful to learn that all one's acquaintances are thieves," he said. "But that does not change my opinion of stealing."

""But my God!" cried Oliver; "did you come to New York to preach sermons?"

"To which the other answered, "I came to practise law. And the lawyer who will not fight injustice is a traitor to his profession.""

Oliver couldn't accept this as his brother's final word, and went on arguing and appealing.

"And so it was that in the small hours of the morning, Montague, pale and nervous, but quite unshaken, was sitting and listening while his brother unfolded before him a picture of the Metropolis as he had come to see it. It was a city ruled by mighty forces—money-forces; great families and fortunes, which had held their sway for generations, and regarded the place, with all its swarming millions, as their birthright. They possessed it utterly—they held it in the hollow of their hands. Railroads and telegraphs and telephones—banks and insurance and trust companies—all these they owned; and the political machines and the legislatures, the courts and the newspapers, the churches and the colleges. And their rule was for plunder; all the streams of profit ran into their coffers. The stranger who came to their city succeeded as he helped them in their purposes, and failed if they could not use him. A great editor or bishop was a man who taught their doctrines; a great statesman was a man who made the laws for them; a great lawyer was one who helped them to outwit the public. Any man who dared to oppose them, they would cast out and trample on, they would slander and ridicule and ruin."

"Montague was amused to notice with what suddenness the stream of invitations slacked up; it was necessary for Alice to give her calling list many revisions."

"A few days later Alice met Mrs. Robbie at a reception; and she took the lady aside, and tried to tell her how distressed and helpless she was. And the result was that Mrs. Robbie flew into a passion and railed at her, declaring in the presence of several people that she had sponged upon her and abused her hospitality! And so poor Alice came home, weeping and half hysterical."

Mrs Billy Alden took up Montague as a result, in society. Mrs Devon, too, was with them. Montague began to get difficult and non paying cases due to his reputation as knight chevalier spreading, but one day Siegfried Hervey invited him to lunch and afterwards, having assured him he was speaking as a friend, asked if Montague was aware that people behind him might have motives other than he thought; he said most people thought they were looking for a price, but Hervey himself thought it was about control of the forty million dollar company.

Hervey asked Montague who had brought him the Hasbrook case, whether it was Judge Ellis, and confirmed, told him that this judge was involved in shady deals.

"His friend's talk had been like a flash of lightning; it revealed huge menacing forms in the darkness about him."
....................................................................................................


Montague went to Albany to ask judge himself, who frankly said he wouldnt tell if he knew about interested parties behind Hasbrook, but Montague had a case he was paid well for, and the visit was merely seeking reassurance for himself. Montague went home, aware that he could do nothing, but only be careful next time.

So he thought.

A few days later a canvassing agent for a society scandal sheet came asking him to subscribe fifteen hundred dollars, and hinted that he ought to consult friends before refusing. Montague sent him packing, and next time he looked at the sheet in a couple of days, there was scandal about him and Mrs Winnie Duval. He could do nothing about it, except send a note apologising to her and suggesting they not meet for a while. She called inviting him for dinner.

Montague went, and she had them dine in privacy in her apartment. Later they talked, and she said she had no intention of giving up her friendships due to machinations such as the scandal sheet, which, she informed him, was manipulated by Mrs Robbie Walling in this case.

But then a scene, painful to him, followed. She told him to call her Evelyn, and said she was lonely, in love with him, and owed nothing to her husband who didn't care; this was more than proved by the behaviour of the husband who came in, and assuming they were lovers, wished Montague well, only cautioning him to be discreet. After he left, Mrs Winnie Duval implored him, but he explained he couldn't, even though he was attracted, and left.

Oliver, however, found a long dark hair on his coat when Montague got home, and assumed he was having an affair as per the scandal sheet; and so assuming, he introduced Montague to the stage artist he'd had an affair with, Rosalie, who was very pretty and had risen from slums. Oliver had picked her out of a chorus and got her bigger parts, by paying money.
....................................................................................................


Hereabouts, one begins to see the pattern of Upton Sinclair's characters, including his protagonists, evolving, from Montague here to ultimately Lanny Budd in the World's End series.

Montague is the squeaky clean moral that Upton Sinclair was himself as a young man, according to the autobiographical parts in his The Brass Check. Lanny is innocent and naive, too, until various events and people open him, not to vice but certainly to love outside matrimonial bonds - his affairs with Marie and Rosemary are evidence that while he's good, loving, and kind, with complete fidelity every time, he took refuge in love as he found it, until the death of his second wife Trudy, when he mourned, and later it was too risky for him to involve or even marry, despite temptations galore, such as Hilde Donnerstein and other very attractive, inviting candidates, debutantes ready to marry him, or, married young women like Rosemary or Hilde Donnerstein, lonely and very willing to have affairs. Then Lanny resisted just as Montague does here.

Rosalie, too, evolves into Phyllis Gracyn, the very successful stage and film artist, whom he loved but lost to stage. Here Oliver is her sponsor, while Gracyn accepts a man she cares nothing for, for sake of her career.

And in Laura Hegan, one recognises a germination that leads to several separate, individual young women in Lanny's life, from Irma Barnes to Priscilla Hoyle.
....................................................................................................


Metropolis ends with two, rather three, blows delivered swiftly to Montague in rapid succession, and his consequent decision to quit Oliver's Society game - he'd have nothing to do with it, and find less expensive quarters to live and see if he could make an honest living.

For Hasbrook sends intimation on the morning of the court case to the effect that he's settled, and Montague's secretary informs him that the number exists no more - Hasbrook was a front, and has disappeared. At a party he attended at invitation of Siegfried Hervey, Laura Hegan had been rude to him, and Oliver informs him that Mrs Winnie Duval has accused him according to Mrs Vivie Patton of misconduct. Montague wouldn't believe it, and says Mrs Vivie Patton is lying, but realises that it wouldn't matter, since everyone believes what Oliver has heard from Mrs Vivie Patton said, anyway.
....................................................................................................
....................................................................................................