In a city in transition, where yesterday is as dead as a dead century, where those who prepare the old year for burial are already taking the ante-mortem statement of the new, the future fulfils the functions of the present. Time itself is considered merely as a by-product of horse-power, discounted with flippancy as the unavoidable friction clogging the fly-wheel of progress.
Memory, once a fine art, is becoming a lost art in Manhattan.
His world and his city had almost ceased to think of Siward.
For a few weeks men spoke of him in the several clubs of which he had lately been a member--spoke of him always in the past tense; and after a little while spoke of him no more.
In that section of the social system which he had inhabited, his absence on account of his mother's death being taken for granted, people laid him away in their minds almost as ceremoniously as they had laid away the memory of his mother. Nothing halted because he was not present; nothing was delayed, rearranged, or abandoned because his familiar presence chanced to be missing. There remained only one more place to fill at a cotillion, dinner, or bridge party; only another man for opera box or week's end; one man the more to be counted on, one more man to be counted out--transferred to the credit of profit and loss, and the ledger closed for the season.
They who remembered him, among those who had not yet lost that old-fashioned art, were very few--a young girl here and there, over whom he had been absent-mindedly sentimental; a débutante or two who had adored him from a distance as a friend of elder sister or brother; here and there an old, old lady to whom he had been considerate, and who perhaps remembered something of the winning charm of the Siwards when the town was young--his father, perhaps, perhaps his grandfather--these thought of him at intervals; the remainder had no leisure to remember even if they had not forgotten how to do it. Several cabmen missed him for a while; now and then a privileged café waiter inquired about him from gay, noisy parties entering some old haunt of his. Mr. Desmond, of art gallery and roulette notoriety, whose business is not to forget, was politely regretful at his absence from certain occult ceremonies which he had at irregular intervals graced with votive offerings. And the list ended there--almost, not quite; for there were two people who had not forgotten Siward: Howard Quarrier and Beverly Plank; and one other, a third, who could not yet forget him if she would--but, as yet, she had not tried very desperately.