On Saturday evening the delivery of a gown she had picked out of
Shipley’s stock to wear to the dinner made it necessary to explain why
she had purchased it. It was the simplest of dinner gowns which she
drew from the box and held up for her mother’s and Ethel’s inspection.
“What earthly use can you have for that, Grace?” Ethel demanded.
Grace laid it across her mother’s knees and Mrs. Durland took a fold in
her fingers to appraise the material.
“It’s certainly pretty. This is one of the new shades, isn’t it, Grace?
It isn’t blue exactly----”
“They call it hydrangea blue, mother. Please hurry and say I’ll look
scrumptious in it!”
“I don’t think I’d have chosen just _that_,” remarked Ethel putting
down a handkerchief she was embroidering, in flourishing script with
the initials O. H., to eye the garment critically. “If I were in your
place and could afford to spend what that must have cost I think I’d
have got something in one of the more definite shades. You can’t really
say whether that’s blue or pink.”
“That’s the artistic part of it, old dear,” replied Grace amiably.
“It’s out of the new spring stock and considered very smart. Wake up,
daddy! Tell me you don’t think I’m stung!”
“I guess my views about dresses wouldn’t help you much, Grace,”
Durland remarked, glancing at the gown absently and returning to his
interminable calculations.
“You’ll look sweet in it, Grace,” Mrs. Durland volunteered. “You think
it isn’t cut too low?”
“It’s the very latest model, mother. I don’t believe you’ll think it
too low when you see me in it. I tried it on at my lunch hour yesterday
and a customer got her eye on it and did her best to coax me to let her
have it. But I sold her another gown that cost twenty dollars more, so
Shipley’s didn’t lose anything.”
“You get so many clothes, Grace,” Ethel interrupted again intent upon
her embroidery. “I don’t just see what you can want with a dress like
that.”
“Oh, this is for a special occasion. Miss Reynolds has asked me to
dinner Tuesday. She’s entertaining for Mrs. Mary Graham Trenton, who’s
to lecture here that night.”
“You don’t mean it!” exclaimed Mrs. Durland. “I read in the paper that
Mrs. Trenton was to speak here. I’d never have thought of connecting
her with Miss Reynolds!”
“They’ve never met, I think. A friend of Miss Reynolds’s in Boston
wrote and asked her to see that Mrs. Trenton was properly looked
after, so she’s putting her up and pulling off a dinner in her honor.
I might say that she didn’t appear to be awfully keen about it. She’s
asking Dr. Ridgely and Judge Sanders and Dr. Loomis with their ladies,
so theology, law and medicine will be represented. She asked me, I
suppose, because I happened to mention to her once that I had read Mrs.
Trenton’s ‘Clues to a New Social Order.’ And it may be in her mind that
as a poor working girl I represent the proletariat.”
“She may have thought that being a friend of Mr. Trenton’s it would be
pleasant for Mrs. Trenton to meet you,” said Ethel sweetly.
“Thank you, sister, you’re certainly the little mind reader,” Grace
replied.
“I’m sure it’s very kind of Miss Reynolds to ask you,” remarked Mrs.
Durland hastily, fearing a clash between the sisters. “There are no
finer people in town than the Sanders and I have always heard splendid
things about Dr. Loomis and his wife. It’s a privilege to meet people
like that. I hope you realize that a woman of Miss Reynolds’s position
can have her pick of the town. She’s certainly paying you a great
compliment, Grace.”
“I don’t understand Miss Reynolds at all,” said Ethel. “She’s the last
woman in the world you’d think would take a creature like Mary Graham
Trenton into her house.”
“It’s because she is Miss Reynolds that she can do as she pleases,”
replied Mrs. Durland conciliatingly. “And as she was asked by a friend
to show some courtesy to Mrs. Trenton, she isn’t doing any more than
any one else would do in the same circumstances. As I said when Grace
first spoke of meeting Mr. Trenton, his wife’s a dangerous woman. It’s
in her power to do a great deal of mischief in the world. I don’t
believe Miss Reynolds has any patience with Mrs. Trenton’s ideas, and
it can’t do Grace any harm to meet her. You ought to be glad, Ethel,
that Miss Reynolds feels that Grace would fit into a select party like
that.”
“I’ll be surprised if Dr. Ridgely goes to the dinner,” replied Ethel.
“That woman is fighting everything the church stands for. If I had my
way she wouldn’t be allowed to speak here.”
“That’s no joke!” replied Grace good-naturedly. “But there are
people, you know, who are not afraid of hearing radical ideas--a few
broad-minded people who think it safer to let the cranks talk out in
the open than to drive them into a cellar to touch off the gentle bomb.”
“Many people feel just that way, Ethel,” said Mrs. Durland.
Mrs. Durland’s disapproval of Mrs. Trenton and the ideas identified
with that lady’s name was much softened by the fact that Grace was to
be included in a formal dinner which Miss Reynolds had undoubtedly
arranged with care. And while Mary Graham Trenton might entertain and
preach the most shocking ideas she was nevertheless one of the best
known and most discussed women in America, besides being the inheritor
of wealth and social position. Miss Reynolds’s marked liking for
Grace afforded Mrs. Durland a satisfaction not wholly attributable to
veneration for Miss Reynolds’s money or unassailable position as a
member of a pioneer Indianapolis family. Grace’s unaccountable ways
and her assertions of independence often brought alarm and dismay to
the mother’s heart; but Grace was indubitably lovely to look at and
the fine spirit in which she had accepted and met the curtailment of
her course at the university excused many things. Grace had wits and
she would go far, but the traveling would have to be on broad highways
of her own choosing. It was not without twinges of heartache that
Mrs. Durland realized that this dark-eyed daughter was peculiarly a
child of the new order; that not by prayer, threat or cajolery could
she be made to walk in old paths or heed the old admonitions. But
there had been Morleys who were independent and forthright and Miss
Reynolds’s invitation implied a recognition of Grace as a well-bred and
intelligent girl.
Mrs. Durland, busily sewing, had been giving Grace such information as
she possessed about the Sanderses, who were to be of Miss Reynolds’s
company. Hardly less than the sons and daughters of Virginia and
Kentucky, Mrs. Durland was possessed of a vast amount of lore touching
the families of her native state. Mrs. Sanders was a Shelton of the
old Bartholomew County family of that name. Some Shelton had once
been engaged in business with a Morley who was a second cousin of
Mrs. Durland. It was a tannery she thought, though it might have
been a brickyard. And Sanders’s father had been a prominent citizen
somewhere on the lower Wabash and had married into the Alston family
of Vanderburgh County. Grace lent a sympathetic ear to this recital
of ancient Hoosier history chiefly because her mother found so great
a pleasure in reciting it. It was the cruelest of ironies that her
mother, with all her adoration of the State and its traditions and her
constant recurrence to the past glories of the Morleys, lived a life of
self-denial apart from contemporaries capable of sharing her pride and
pleasure in the old times.
The talk had wandered far from Grace’s dinner engagement when Ethel,
who had been quietly plying her needle, took advantage of a lull to
switch it back.
“I suppose you won’t feel _quite_ like a stranger with Mrs. Trenton,”
she suggested. “Mr. Trenton has no doubt told his wife of his
acquaintance with you.”
“No doubt he has,” Grace replied calmly. “In fact he told me he had
written her about me.”
This was not wholly candid; Trenton had only said that he had written
to his wife, pursuant to an understanding between them, that he had
met a girl who greatly interested him. But Ethel’s remark occasioned
Grace a moment of discomfort. In her last meeting with Trenton his wife
had not been mentioned, but it was possible that by now he had made a
complete confession of his unfaithfulness. Irene Kirby had frequently
commented upon Trenton’s frankness; Grace chilled at the thought that
he might already have told his story to Mrs. Trenton in the hope of
hastening the day of his freedom.
The newspapers were devoting much space to Mrs. Trenton’s impending
visit. On Saturday and Sunday her portrait adorned the society pages,
accompanied by sketches of her life and activities in the feminist
cause that did full justice to her distinguished ancestry and high
social connections. In the Durland home Mrs. Trenton continued to be a
fruitful subject of discussion. There were things which Ethel thought
should be said to Mrs. Trenton. She even considered asking Dr. Ridgely
to say them,--a proposition which Grace derided and Mrs. Durland
did not encourage. Ethel was further inspired with the idea that a
committee of the best women of the city should wait upon Mrs. Trenton
and try to convince her of the dangerous character of the doctrines she
was advocating.
“You’re taking it altogether too seriously,” said Grace. “I don’t
suppose that woman’s ever made a single convert. About so many people
have always held her ideas--about marriage and things like that. The
real radicals probably look on her as a huge joke. A woman who visits
at Newport and goes cruising on yachts doesn’t just put herself clear
outside the social breastworks. There are other, women besides Mrs.
Trenton who talk free love and birth control and things like that just
for the excitement and the attention they get.”
“They should be locked up, every one of them!” Ethel declared. “I’m
ashamed for our city that she can come here and be received by people
you’d expect better things of, and be allowed to speak. The police
should stop it!”
“Well, she can’t ruin the town with one lecture,” Grace replied
good-naturedly. “The Twentieth Century Club brings all sorts of
lunatics here and the members are about the most conservative people in
town. You couldn’t change the minds of any of them any more than you
could knock over the soldiers’ monument with a feather duster.”