To Paris they went; and there, occupying more fashionable quarters,
began to look about for pleasure. The looking required effort at first
and was scantily rewarded; but of course it was not long before the
women's spirits responded to the more hopeful atmosphere. Soon they fell
in with some lively people from home, the Wintons, who, being a peg or
two lower than the Heths in the gay world, made it almost indelicately
plain that they were completely unaware of anything's having happened.
To Paris also came J. Forsythe Avery.
And now, in the passage of the weeks, the mother and daughter were at
home again, with Carlisle finding that memory still had power to stab,
and Mrs. Heth stoutly girding herself for the great fight of her life,
and almost happy....
If it had taken the violent break to reveal to Cally how deeply Hugo
Canning had come into her life, it seemed to take this home-coming to
impress upon her how definitely he had departed. There was hardly
anything in the house that was not in some way associated with him, or
with her thought of him. Outdoors it was hardly better: wherever she
turned, she found, mementoes of his absence. Strange and sad to think
that he and she would ride these familiar streets no more. He had left
her alone, to find her feet again in a changed world as best she might.
Where was he on this day and on this, with whom making merry, her false
knight who could not love as he could fear the world's opinion?...
It was September, and people were beginning to troop back in numbers
from the holiday places of their desire. Cally's first days at home were
full of meetings, with those now seen for the first time under strangely
altered conditions.
She was not wanting in spirit, but she lacked her mother's splendid
pachydermousness. More than mamma, she had shrunk from this first
painful plunge, and now that it had come she was receptive to
impressions which quite escaped the older lady. Outwardly, indeed, as
she perceived with some surprise, the greetings of friends and
acquaintances were much as they had always been. But she was at once
conscious of a certain new quality in people's looks, a certain hard
exploring curiosity, not untouched with a fleeting and furtive air of
triumph. This look seemed to confront her, with varying degrees of
emphasis, on nearly every face. To her sensitiveness it was as if,
beneath cordial speech, everybody was really saying: "Aha!... So you're
the young lady who hounded that chap into killing himself and got jilted
for your pains. Well, well! Perhaps you won't be quite so
high-and-mighty after this...."
Even Carlisle's most intimate friends, try as they doubtless did, seemed
unable to help showing that they considered her lot in the world sadly
changed. So, indeed, it was. Mattie and Evey could not, for instance,
begin naturally by asking, "Cally, did you have a lovely summer?"--when
of course they knew very well that she had had a perfectly frightful
summer. Mattie came in before eleven o'clock on the first morning,
chirping affectionate greetings; but neither then nor later did she
manage to convey any real sense of sympathy with Cally, or of
understanding what she had been through, or even of wanting to
understand. Cally would have liked to justify herself to Mattie, to talk
her heart out to her, or to somebody; but Mattie's idea was clearly to
keep Cally's mind off it, as you do with the near relatives of the
deceased. And was it possible that even Mats's sweet girlishness showed
a subtle trace of confirmation of the Frenchman's bitter maxim, that in
the misfortunes of our friends there is something not altogether
displeasing to us?...
If with Mats and Evey, so and much more so with others, less genuinely
friendly. Nobody took the responsibility of open condemnation, as by
"cutting" Mrs. B. Thornton Heth or her daughter. On the other hand,
nobody forgot; nobody made allowances; nobody asked a single question.
Judgment was obviously passed, and everybody seemed perfectly clear
about the verdict. The Heths were people to be treated with respect as
long as they kept their money, but between you and me, their social
fortunes had received a stain which would not wear off. Hugo Canning had
had it exactly right. Cally Heth would be pointed at to the longest day
she lived....
Cally, after the first shrinking, was possessed by a sense of
anti-climax. Life had a brassy ring. She had come home with at least
something of her mother's military keenness for the "campaign" of
vindication, but within a day or two she was thinking, rather cynically
and cheaply, that the game was not worth the candle. What difference did
it all make, in her actual life? People might whisper and nudge behind
her back, but their invitations seemed to come in much the same as ever,
poor mamma pouncing on each as it came, with a carefully appraising eye.
Wasn't there a hollowness in all this, something wanting?...
Untrained for analysis as she was, she had not thought of herself, in
the months in Europe, as "changed" exactly. It took this recontact with
the familiar environment to reveal to her definitely that her
experiences of the spring and summer had not rolled through her as
through an iron tube. Here were the old stimuli (as scientific fellows
term them); but they failed to bring the old reactions. She was aware
that the elevation of the family position, or its rescue, no longer
filled her whole horizon. Old values shifted. In particular, she found
her soul revolting at the prospect of another season--her fifth--another
winter of endless parties, now with a secret campaign thrown in.
"I'm tired of the same old round, that's all," she said, moodily. "I
want something new--something _different_."
"There's plenty that's new and different, Cally," said Henrietta Cooney,
cheerfully, "if you really want to go in for it. And ten times as
interesting as your old society...."
"And while I think of it," added Hen, "I want to book you now for
Saturday afternoon, four-thirty--open meeting at the Woman's Club on
What Can We Do to Help the Poor. Don't say no. This new man Pond's going
to speak, Director of the Settlement. He'll give us something to take
home and think about."
This conversation took place on the way home from a meeting of the
Equal Suffrage League, to which Henrietta had borne off Cally, not so
completely against the latter's will as you might have supposed. And
oddly enough, Cally found that she could talk quite freely to her poor
cousin, partly because of Hen's insignificance in the gay world, partly,
perhaps, because of the way she had written during the summer.
"Aren't you going to the Settlement opening on Thursday?"
"Can't get away from the bookstore in time. Saturday's a short day,"
said Hen, her eyes on space.... "Look around you, Cally. You'll see lots
more women than you who're sick of parties. I tell you this is the most
interesting time to be alive in that ever was."
Cally smiled wearily at these enthusiasms. Nevertheless she could by now
understand at least what Hen supposed she was talking about. It was as
if the cataclysm in the May-time had chipped a peep-hole in the
embracing sphere of her girlhood's round, and through this hole she
began to discern novel proceedings afoot....
Strange talk was in the air of the old town in those days, strange
things heard and seen. Not a few women of the happy classes had grown
"sick of parties." They grew sick of years lived without serious
purpose, waiting for husband and children which sometimes never came;
sick of their dependence, of their idleness, of their careful
segregation from the currents of life about them. They wearied, in
short, of their position of inferior human worth, which some perceived,
and others began dimly to suspect, under that glittering cover of
fictions which looked so wholly noble till you stopped to think (which
women should never do), and dared to glance sidewise at the seams
underneath. And now lately some high-hearted spirits had begun to voice
their sickness, courageously braving those penalties which society so
well knows how to visit upon those who disturb the accepted prejudices;
penalties, it might be, peculiarly trying to women, over which some of
these supposedly masculated pioneers doubtless had more than one good
cry in secret.
What could be more interesting than the revolt of woman against
"chivalry" in chivalry's old home and seat? That curious phenomenon was
going on in Cally's town now, though acuter social critics than she had
quite failed to discover it....
Far rumors of her sex's strange activities reached Cally, and she
listened, but with apathy. She marvelled at the freshness of interest
with which Mattie and Evey McVey were preparing for the light routine
which by now they knew like an old shoe. But her own mood was nothing
more forceful than meaningless restlessness and discontent. Not even the
unlooked-for arrival, one morning, of the dividend from the bank stock
her father had given her in May, all her own, afforded her more than a
flicker of the familiar joys. How employ fifteen hundred dollars so that
it would bring her happiness now? Cally, after listless deliberation,
took her wealth to her father that afternoon, offering it as a
contribution toward mamma's Settlement donation. Her impulse was hardly
sheer magnanimity; still, it was known that finance was a distinctly
live issue in the House just now.
However, papa, after staring at her a moment, merely gathered her into
his arms, check and all, remarking that she was a goose; and when she
tried to argue about it a little, he ruled the situation with a strong
paternal hand. She was to buy herself pretties with that money, he said;
and there, there, he didn't want to hear any more foolishness about it.
No more Alphonse and Gaspard, as the fellow said....
"And, Cally," he added, pinching her cheek, "I want you to have a good
time this winter, remember. You can have anything you want. Go
everywhere you're invited--enjoy yourself with your friends--have a good
time. D'you hear me?"
She said that she did: and as she spoke, a bitter question rose at her.
Who were her friends? She had always thought of herself as having many;
"hosts of friends" had always figured prominently in her inventories of
her blessings. But what was a friend? Among all these people she had
spent her life with, there was not one, it seemed, who cared to
understand the infinite shadings of thought and impulse that had brought
her to where she now stood; much less one heart which saw intuitively
All the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb...
Papa was adding, with an unconscious frown:
"The cash is in the bank, if your mother must have it. I'd laid it by
for something else, though--make some repairs at the Works. Come in....
I reckon I've staved off ..."
Considered from one angle, these fragmentary words might have been
illuminating; but Cally did not even hear them. At that moment there
happened the unexpected. The parlormaid Annie entered, announcing Mrs.
Berkeley Page to see Miss Carlisle.
Surprise was expressed in the study. This was the lady who had said that
the Heths were very improbable people. Papa opined, somewhat glumly,
that she had come to beg funds for the confounded Settlement. Cally,
having looked at herself in the mirror, trailed into the drawing-room
with a somewhat cool and challenging civility.
But her coolness soon melted away, under the visitor's strange but
seemingly genuine cordiality. It became clear that she had come in the
vein of amity, and without sinister motives; though why, if not for
Settlement funds, could not be imagined.
Mrs. Page was a tall, pleasant-faced woman, still on the right side of
forty, a widow whose husband had left her too much of this world's goods
for her ever to be classed as a poorhouse Tory; and despite the fact
that she was a leader in the old-school, as opposed to the brass-band,
set, many people considered her a very agreeable woman. She had amusing
things to say, and she said them in the Heth drawing-room with no air of
awkwardness. Carlisle, somewhat against her will, was soon thinking her
extremely attractive. But the thawing out went further than that.
Talk turned by chance--or perhaps it was not chance exactly--on those
growing currents of feminine activity which had nothing to do with
dinners and dances: and here the visitor expressed ideas which did not
seem old-school in the least. It appeared that she, Mary Page, in the
period of her spinsterhood, for she hadn't been married till she was
twenty-six, a thoroughgoing old maid in those days,--had also wearied of
the gay round; she had desired to _do something_. But alas, she had
suddenly discovered that she wasn't fitted to do one earthly thing,
having been trained only to be a trimming. She said, smiling, that she
had cried all one day about it....
"Why is it assumed, really," said she, "that women are such poor little
butterflies that amusing and being amused should absorb all their
energies? I don't think of myself as a pet, do you, Miss Heth? Give us
something solid to do, and the world wouldn't be so full of discontented
women. Do you know, if I had a daughter," said Mrs. Page, "and she
wasn't married after three years 'out,' and hadn't developed any special
talent, I should send her straight down to Hartman's Business College,
and have her learn typewriting. Yes, I should!--and make her get a place
in an office, too, at five dollars a week!..."
The distinguished visitor remained twenty minutes in the improbable
drawing-room, and contrived to make herself interesting. When she rose
to go, she mentioned that she was staying at her mother's place in the
country till after Thanksgiving, and was only in town for the day. And
then, as she held out her hand, smiling in a simple and friendly way,
her expression changed, and she brought up her other hand and laid it
over Carlisle's.
"My dear," she began, with some embarrassment, "I wonder if you will let
a much older woman say how truly she has sympathized with you in--all
this trouble--and how much she has admired you, too?..."
Cally's eyes wavered and fell. And suddenly she divined that this, and
nothing else, was what Mrs. Page had come to say.
"All of us make mistakes in this world," went on the kind voice--"all
that I know do wrong. But not all of us, I'm afraid, have the courage to
go back and set right what we did, as bravely as you have done."
The girl stood dumb.... Strange, indeed, that the first word of
understanding sympathy she had had since her home-coming--barring only
Hen Cooney--should have come from this worse than stranger, whom at a
distance she had long secretly envied and disliked. One touch of
generous kindness, and the hostility of years seemed to fall away....
She raised her eyes, trying with indifferent success to smile. But
perhaps her look showed something of what she felt: for Mrs. Page
immediately took the girl's face between her hands and kissed her
lightly on the cheek.
"May I?... I mean by it that I hope you'll let me know you better, when
I'm home again.... Good-bye."
Cally caught the gloved hand upon her cheek, and said, with an
impulsiveness far from her habit:
"I think you're the sweetest person I ever saw...."
* * * * *
And two days later, she said to her mother, though in a distinctly
frivolous tone:
"What would you think of me as a Settlement worker, mamma?"
"Settlement worker?... Well, we'll see," said Mrs. Heth, absently. "It
remains to be seen how far the best people are going in for it...."
Cally laughed. She was beautifully dressed, and felt perfectly poised.
It was five o'clock in the afternoon, and she and her mother were in the
new vindication limousine, en route to the old Dabney House.
"What difference does that make?"
"All the difference.... Now, Cally, don't pick up any of poor
Henrietta's equality notions, just because you feel a little blue at
present. This is going to come out all right. You may trust me."
"I do," said Cally, sincerely.
After a silence she added with a laugh: "Who are the best people,
mamma?"
"I am, for one," said mamma; and unconsciously her grasp lightened on
the little ornamental bag where snuggled her Settlement check for Ten
Thousand Dollars, securely bagged at last.
"Don't let any poor nobodies pull you down to their level with their
talk about merit," said mamma. "What's merit in society?"