As I look back on those weeks of days, each one crowded like a ragbag
with rubbish, the figure of Edna stands out radiant. You would never
have thought her the mother of the bride--or, indeed, a mother at all.
A woman who for many years leads a virginal or almost virginal life
gets back the vestal air of the unmarried girl. This air had returned
to Edna. She had it as markedly as had Margot. It was most becoming
to her piquant style of beauty, giving it the allure of the height
that invites ascent and capture, yet has never been desecrated. And
how she did enjoy the grandeur--the great names, the gorgeous presents
of curiously and costlily wrought gold and silver and crystal, and
precious stones, the succession of panoramas of ultra-fashionable life,
with herself and Margot always the center.
I used to stand aside and watch her and feel as if I were hypnotized
into vivid hallucinations. I recalled the incidents of our early
life--Brooklyn, the Passaic flat, the squat and squalid homes of our
childhood. I recalled our people--hers and mine--tucked away in homely
obscurity among the New Jersey hills. But by no effort of mind could I
associate her with these realities. She had literally been born again.
I looked at the other Americans of humble beginnings--and there were
not a few of them in that society. All had retained some traces of
their origin, had some characteristics that made it not difficult to
connect their present with their past. But not Edna.
At the wedding--in the most fashionable church in the West End--Margot
looked weary and rather old, gone slightly stale from too long and
hard preliminary training. Edna was at her best--delicate, fragile,
radiant. How the other women hated her for that time-defying beauty of
hers! Many of the women of her still youthful age retained much of the
physical attractiveness of youth. But there was not another one who
was not beginning to show the effects of dissipation--of too much food
and wine and cigarettes, of lives devoid of elevating sensations, of
minds used only for petty, mean thoughts. But Edna seemed in the flower
of that period when the secrets of the soul have as yet made no marks
upon the countenance. You would have said she was a merry and romantic
girl. I could not fathom that mystery. I cannot fathom it now. Its clew
must be in her truly amazing powers of self-deception and also in that
unique capacity of hers for forgetting the thing, no matter what, that
is disagreeable to remember.
When we were at last alone, with the young couple off for the yacht
Lord Shangway had loaned them for the honeymoon, with the last guest
gone and the last powdered flunkey vanished--when she and I were alone,
she settled herself with a sigh and said:
“I wish I could make it begin all over again!”
“You must be built of steel,” said I.
“I am supremely happy,” said she, “and have been for weeks. Nothing
agrees with me so thoroughly as happiness.”
I looked at her scrutinizingly. No, she was not the least tired; she
was as fresh as if that moment risen from a long sleep in the air of
seashore or mountains.
She went on: “I’m going over to Paris to-morrow. I’ve a lot of
engagements there. And I must get some clothes. I’ve worn out all I
brought with me.”
“Worn out” meant worn once or at most twice; for in a society where
everyone is seeing everyone else all the time a woman with a reputation
for dress cannot afford to reappear in clothes once seen. In some
circles this would sound delightfully prodigal, in others delightfully
impossible, and perhaps in still others delightfully criminal. But then
all that sort of thing is relative--like everything else in the world.
“Won’t you come along?” said she in a perfunctory tone.
“No, thanks,” I replied. “I’m off for Russia with a party of bankers to
look at some mining properties.”
“I thought you were returning to New York?”
“Not for several months,” said I.
“How can you stay away so long from your beloved America?”
“Business--always business.”
She eyed me somewhat as one eyes a strange, mildly interesting
specimen. “Well--you must enjoy it, or you wouldn’t keep at it year in
and year out.”
“One has to pass the time,” said I.
“How does Mary Kirkwood pass the time?”
This unexpected and--except sub-consciously--accidental question,
staggered me for an instant. “I don’t know much about it,” said I. “She
has a house--and she looks after it, herself. She reads, I believe.
She has gardens--and they use up a lot of time. Then she rides.”
Edna yawned. “It sounds dull,” she said. “But domestic people are
always dull. And she is certainly domestic. I wonder why she doesn’t
marry again.”