Lee knew a man who, because of his light strength
and mastery of horses, had spent a prolonged youth riding in
gentlemen's steeplechases for the great Virginia stables; a career of
racing silk and odds and danger, of highly ornamental women and
champagne, of paddocks and formal halls and surreptitious little ante-
rooms. That he envied; and, recalling his safe ignominious usefulness
during the war, he envied the young half-drunk aviators sweeping in
reckless arcs above the fortified German cities.
Or was it, again, only youth that he lamented, conscious of its
slipping supinely from his grasp? Yet, if that were all, why was he
rebellious about the present, the future, rather than the past? Lee
Randon wasn't looking back in a self-indulgent melancholy. Nor was he
an isolated, peculiar being; yes, all the men he knew had, more or
less, his own feeling; he could think of none, even half intelligent,
who was happy. Each had Lee's aspect of having been forced into a
consummation he would not have selected, of something temporary,
hurried, apologetic.
He thought more specially of men celebrated in great industries, who
had accumulated power beyond measure, millions almost beyond count--
what extravagantly mad outlets they turned to! The captains of steel,
of finance, were old, spent, before they were fifty, broken by
machinery and strain in mid-life, by a responsibility in which they
were like pig iron in an open hearth furnace.
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