He offered to help her with her fur, but she wouldn't have that, threw
the garment over her arm and flung round the table, then checked and
looked back. "You understand--this ends it--for all time?"
"I couldn't do you the injustice of thinking anything else."
She made a tempestuous exit through the curtains. Bellamy grunted in
self-disgust, lighted a cigarette, and looked up to see the suavely
concerned countenance of Theodore.
"Something is wrong, Mr. Druce? The lady----?"
"Was suddenly taken ill. Be good enough to cancel the rest of the order,
Theodore, and let me have my bill. And--yes, think I will--you may send
me a Scotch and soda."
Bellamy consulted his watch. Just on two: Linda's luncheon party would
be in full swing. He had nothing better to do, might as well look in at
the Ritz. Linda would like it....
V
"Three o'clock, Thomas, say a quarter to."
"Yes, madam."
The footman performed a faultless salute and doubled round to hop into
place beside the chauffeur, while the door-porter shut the door with a
bang whose nicely calculated volume told all the world within ear-shot
that the door-porter of the fashionable hotel of the day was banging the
door to Mrs. Bellamy Druce's brougham.
The technique of every calling is similarly susceptible of refinement
into an art.
Two Lucinda Druces crossed the sidewalk and passed through the turnstile
of bright metal and plate-glass which served as a door at the
Forty-sixth street entrance to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel--the one
perceptible to mortal vision a slender and fair young person costumed in
impeccable taste and going her way with that unstudied grace which is
the last expression of man's will to make woman a creature whose love
shall adorn him.
To the luncheon-hour mob that milled in the meagre foyer of this hotel,
which holds its public by studiously subjecting it to every Continental
inconvenience, she presented the poise of a pretty woman who has never
known care more galling than uncertainty as to her most becoming
adornment. Not even the shadow of that other Lucinda who walked with
her, who was no more separate from her than her own shadow, who ceased
not to beat her bosom and cry to Heaven for help, was to be detected in
the composed, steady eyes that searched swiftly, but without seeming to
see, the faces of that congested congregation of fashionables and
half-fashionables and would-be fashionables, their apes and sycophants
and audience.
Seeing nowhere those whom she was seeking, Lucinda made her way to the
lounge; or it would be more true to say a way was made for her by the
simple prestige of her presence, by the magic whisper of her name from
mouth to mouth commanding a deference neither beauty nor breeding alone
could have earned her.
The lounge was at that hour three-quarters invested by an overflow of
tables from the dining-room proper, only at its eastern end a few easy
chairs and settees had been left for the accommodation of those lucky
enough to win past the functionary who guarded the portals, charged with
winnowing the sheep from the goats, admitting the elect to this
antechamber to the one true Olympus, shunting off the reject to the
limbo of the downstairs grill.
Sighting Lucinda from afar, with a bow of ineffable esteem this one
glided forward. "Mrs. Sedley and Mrs. Guest are waiting for you, Mrs.
Druce." At the same time Lucinda herself discovered her friends
occupying a settee, with Fanny Lontaine between them. "Your table is
quite ready. Do you wish luncheon to be served at once?"
Lucinda assented pleasantly and passed on. Immediately the headwaiter
caught the eye of a subaltern in the middle of the room, and in intimate
silence conversed with him without moving a muscle more than the
superciliary. The confederate acknowledged this confidence by
significantly dropping his lashes, then in even more cryptic fashion
flashed on the inspiring intelligence to that statuesque figure which,
from the head of the stairs, between lounge and oval dining-room,
brooded with basilisk eyes over the business of both. Thus a minor
miracle was worked, bringing that one at once to life and down to earth;
in another moment the maitre-d'hotel himself was attentive at Lucinda's
elbow.
"But I never dreamed you three knew one another!" she was exclaiming in
the surprise of finding Fanny Lontaine on terms with those whom she had
bidden to meet her. "Fanny, why didn't you tell me----?"
"But I didn't know--how should I?--your Nelly Guest was Ellen Field
married."
"That's so; I'd completely forgotten you both come from Chicago."
"Hush!" Nelly Guest gave a stage hiss. "Someone might hear. You never
forget anything, do you? And all these years I've tried so hard to live
it down! It's no fair...."
Impressively convoyed, the quartet proceeded to "Mrs. Druce's table" in
the oval room. Rumour of gossip and turning of heads attended their
progress, flattery to which Lucinda, Nelly and Jean were inured, of
which they were aware only as they were of sensuous strains of stringed
music, the orderly stir of waiters, the satisfying sheen of silver and
napery, the brilliance and brouhaha of that gathering of amiable
worldlings, and the heady breath of it, a subtly blended, oddly
inoffensive melange of scents of flowers and scented flesh, smells of
cooked food and cigarette smoke.
But in the understanding of Fanny Lontaine, accustomed to admiration as
she was, and no stranger to the public life of European capitals, the
flutter caused by the passage of her companions through a phase of
existence so polite and skeptical conferred upon them an unmistakable
cachet. She had been long abroad and out of touch, she had never been on
intimate terms with New York ways, but the busy mind at work behind her
round eyes of a child was like a sponge for the absorption of delicate
nuances and significant signs of all sorts. Life had made it like that.
Six years married, and two years older than Lucinda Druce, Fanny
retained, and would till the end, whatever life might hold in store for
her, a look of wondering and eager youthfulness. Romance trembled
veritably upon her lashes. She had a way of holding her lips slightly
apart and looking steadily at one when spoken to, as if nothing more
interesting had ever been heard by the ears ambushed in her bobbed,
ashen hair. Her eyes of a deep violet shade held an innocence of
expression little less than disconcerting. Her body seemed never to have
outgrown its adolescence, yet its slightness was quite without any
angularity or awkwardness, it achieved roundness without plumpness, a
stroke of physical genius. In the question of dress she showed a
tendency to begin where the extreme of the mode left off, a fault held
venial in view of her apparent immaturity. And then, of course, she had
lived so long in England, where people are more broad-minded....
Apparently not talkative but a good listener, she had a knack of making
what she did say stick in memory, not so much for its content as for its
manner, a sort of shy audacity that pointed observations often racy and
a candour sometimes devastating. But unless one happened to be looking
at Fanny when she spoke, her remarks were apt to seem less memorable,
her humour less pungent.
"It's heavenly," she now declared, coolly staring at their neighbours
through the smoke of her cigarette--"simply divine to be home. I'm sure
I'd never want to see Europe again if it weren't for Prohibition."
"You're not going to suffer on that account today," Jean Sedley
promised, producing from her handbag a little flash of jewelled gold.
"But I shall!" Fanny protested with tragic expression. "It's the
frightful hypocrisy that's curdling my soul and ruining my insides. It
makes one homesick for England, where people drink too much because they
like it, and not to punish themselves for electing a government which
conscientiously interprets the will of the people--and leaves them to
interpret their wont."
"No dear, thanks." Smilingly Nelly Guest refused to let Jean fill her
glass.
"The figure?" Jean enquired in deep sympathy.
"I've positively got to," Nelly sighed. She cast a rueful glance down
over her plump, pretty person. "Compassionate Columbia simply must not
waddle when she pokes her horn of plenty at famine-stricken China."
"Oh, that wretched pageant!" Lucinda roused from a lapse into communion
with the Lucinda who made an unseen fifth. "When is it? I'd forgotten
all about it." Nelly Guest named a day two weeks in the future. "And I
haven't even thought about my costume! Oh, why do we punish ourselves so
for Charity's sweet sake?"
"Because deep down in our hearts we all like to parade our virtues."
"Much virtue in that plural," Nelly Guest commented.
"Well, I don't like parading mine in pageants, I assure you."
"Don't you, honestly, Cindy?" Fanny asked. "I should think you'd love
that sort of thing. You used to be perfectly mad about acting."
"So is every woman--isn't she?--at one stage or another of her life
convinced she's truly a great actress cheated out of her birthright."
"I know. All the same you know you've got talent. Don't you remember our
open-air performance of _Much Ado About Nothing_? You were a simply
ravishing Rosalind."
"Heavens! What do amateur theatricals prove?"
"For one thing," Jean Sedley commented, "how long-suffering one's
friends can be."
"And one's enemies. Consider what they sit through just to see us make
public guys of ourselves."
"Well!" Nelly Guest lamented: "my pet enemies are going to have a real
treat at the pageant unless I can find some way to reduce, inside a
fortnight."
"There was a man in London had a marvelous system," Fanny volunteered.
"Everybody was going to him last Season. There ought to be somebody like
him over here."
Duly encouraged, she launched into a startlingly detailed account of
London's latest fad in "treatment"; and Lucinda's thoughts turned back
to her other self, insensibly her identity receded into and merged with
its identity again and became lost in its preoccupations.
How to go on, how to play out this farce of a life with Bel when faith
in him was dead?
Strange that faith should have been shattered finally by such a minor
accident as her overhearing that morning's treachery. As if it had been
the first time she had known Bel to be guilty of disloyalty to her! But
today she could not forget that neither love nor any kindly feeling for
his wife, nor even scruples of self-respect, but only dread of a
contretemps had decided Bel against lunching Amelie in that very room,
making open show oL his infatuation before all those people who knew
them both and who, being human, must have gloated, nudged, and tittered;
who, for all Lucinda knew to the contrary, were even now jeering behind
their hands, because they knew things about Bel and his gallivantings
which all the world knew but his wife. Even the servants----!
Her cheeks kindled with indignation--and blazed still more ardently when
she discovered that she had, in her abstraction, been staring squarely
at Richard Daubeney, who was lunching with friends at a nearby table.
But Dobbin bowed and smiled in such a way that Lucinda's confusion and
her sense of grievance were drowned under by a wave of gratitude. She
nodded brightly and gave him a half-laughing glance.
Good old Dobbin! She had never appreciated how much she was missing him
till he had turned up again last night and offered to take his old place
in her life, on the old terms as nearly as might be, the old terms as
necessarily modified by her own change of status.
_What a pity!_
Those three words were so clearly sighed in her mental hearing that
Lucinda, fearing lest she had uttered them aloud, hastily consulted the
faces of her companions. But they had exhausted the subject of reducing
regimes and passed on naturally--seeing that Nelly and Jean were
approaching that stage when such matters become momentous--to that of
"facials."
"... Parr's fuller's earth and witch hazel. Make a thick paste of it and
add a few drops of tincture of benzoin, then simply plaster it all over
your face, but be careful not to get it near your eyes, and let it dry.
It only takes a few minutes to harden, and then you crack and peel it
off, and it leaves your skin like a baby's."
"Elizabeth Baird charges twenty-five dollars a treatment."
"But my dear, you can see for yourself how stupid it is to pay such
prices to a beauty specialist when the materials cost only a few cents
at any drug-store, and anybody can apply it, your maid if you don't want
to take the trouble yourself...."
_What a pity!_
But was it? Would she have been happier married to Dobbin? Was it
reasonable to assume that Dobbin would not have developed in the forcing
atmosphere of matrimony traits quite as difficult as Bel's to deal with?
In this wrong-headed world nobody was beyond criticism, and anybody's
faults, condonable though they might seem at a distance, could hardly
fail of exaggeration into vices through daily observation at close
range. Impossible to imagine any two human creatures living together,
after the first raptures had begun to wane, without getting on each
other's nerves now and then.
Wasn't the fault, then, more with the institution than with the
individuals?
Lucinda remembered having once heard a physician of psycho-analytic bent
commit himself to the statement that in ten years of active professional
life he had never entered one menage where two people lived in wedded
happiness. And sifting a list of married acquaintances, Lucinda found
it not safe to say of one that he or she was happy; of most it was true
that they had the best of reasons for being unhappy. It was true of
Nelly Guest and Jean Sedley, it was true of herself, doubtless it was
true of Fanny. Lucinda had yet to meet Lontaine, and if Fanny's looks
were fair criterion, she was the most carefree of women; and yet...
Fanny caught Lucinda eyeing her and smiled.
"What under the sun are you thinking about so solemnly, Cindy?"
"You, dear. You haven't told me anything about yourself yet."
"No chance. Give me half a show"--Fanny glanced askance at Jean and
Nelly, now amiably engaged in bickering about the merits of various
modistes--"and you shall know All."
"I'd dearly love to. You must lunch with me at home some day soon; and
then I want you and your husband to dine with us--say next Thursday?"
"I don't know. That's one of the exciting things about being married to
Harry Lontaine, one never knows what tomorrow will bring forth. We've
got to go to Chicago soon, because--daresay you know--father relented
enough to leave me a little legacy, nothing to brag about, but nothing
people in our position can afford to despise, either."
Lucinda made a sympathetic face and said something vague about everybody
in England still feeling the pinch of the War. But Fanny elected to
scorn generalizations.
"Oh, the only effect the War could have had on our fortunes would have
been to kill off the half a dozen relatives that stand between Harry and
the title. But he was out of luck--served three years in France and
Flanders and got all shot up and decorated with the dearest little tin
medals on the prettiest ribbons, while his precious kinsmen held down
cushy berths in the Munitions and kept in training for the longevity
record."
"But how proud you must have been----!"
"Of Harry? On account of his decorations? My dear: heroes are
three-a-penny in England today. You see, everybody, more or less,
barring Harry's family, had a shot at active service, just as almost
everybody has a shot at marriage sooner or later; only, of course, the
percentage of unscarred survivors of the War was higher."
(Fanny, too! What a world!)
"For all that, I do want to meet your husband."
"You will, soon enough. He's lunching some men down in the grill, a
business luncheon, American cinema people; and I told him when he got
rid of them to wait for me in the lounge. Very likely we'll find him
there on our way out."
"How nice. He's interested in the motion-picture business then?"
"In a way. That is, he was, in England, for a while, after the War. And
when we decided to come over about my legacy, he secured options on the
American rights to some Swedish productions. Somebody told him you were
having a run on foreign films over here, so Harry said he might as well
try to turn an honest penny. I told him it wouldn't do him any harm,
he'd enjoy the adventure."
"I see," said Lucinda a bit blankly. "I don't know much about it, of
course, almost never go to see a motion picture; that is, unless it's
Elsie Ferguson, I've always been mad about her."
She looked round to the waiter who was substituting a finger-bowl for
her neglected sweet. "We'll all want coffee, Ernest, and you may bring
it to us in the Palm Room."
"Four demi-tasses: yes, Mrs. Druce."
"Nelly! Jean!" These Lucinda haled forth from the noisome morass of the
newest divorce scandal. "Fanny's first husband is waiting for her in
the lounge, and she's getting nervous."
"Good-looking, I suppose?" Jean Sedley enquired, and got a merry nod
from Fanny. "She ought to be nervous. A New York Winter is the open
season for other women's good-looking husbands, it doesn't do to leave
them standing round loose--here of all places!"