Therefore, it puzzled and confused Neergard to be overlooked where the
gay world had been summoned with an accompanying blast from the public
press; therefore he had gone to Rosamund with the curtest of hints; but
he had remained, standing before her, checked, not condescending to
irritation, but mentally alert to a new element of resistance which he
had not expected--a new force, palpable, unlooked for, unclassified as
yet in his schedule for his life's itinerary. That force was the
cohesive power of abstract caste in the presence of a foreign irritant
threatening its atomic disintegration. That foreign and irritating
substance was himself. But he had forgotten in his vanity that which in
his rawer shrewdness he should have remembered. Eternal vigilance was
the price; not the cancelled vouchers of the servitude of dead years and
the half-servile challenge of the strange new days when his vanity had
dared him to live.
* * * * *
Rosamund, smoothly groomed, golden-headed, and smiling, rose as Neergard
moved slowly forward to take his leave.
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