They still had some time with Mrs. Maybough, when they went back to her
before any one else came; Cornelia could see that her features were
rather small and regular, and that her hair was that sort of elderly
blond in color which makes people look younger than they are after they
have passed a certain age. She was really well on in the thirties when
she went out to Leadville to take charge of Charmian Maybough's
education from the New England town where she had always lived, and
ended by marrying Charmian's father. At that time Andrew Maybough had
already made and lost several fortunes without great depravation from
the immoralities of the process; he remained, as he had always been, a
large, loosely good-natured, casual kind of creature, of whom it was a
question whether he would not be buried by public subscription, in the
end; but he died so opportunely that he left the widow of his second
marriage with the income from a million dollars, which she was to share
during her lifetime with the child of his first. Mrs. Maybough went
abroad with her step-daughter, and most of the girl's life had been
spent in Europe.
There was a good deal of Dresden in their sojourn, something of
Florence, necessarily a little of Paris; it was not altogether wanting
in London, where Mrs. Maybough was presented at court. But so far as
definitively materialized society was concerned, Europe could not be
said to have availed. When she came back to her own country, it was
without more than the hope that some society people, whom she had met
abroad, might remember her.
"You'll see the greatest lot of frumps, if they ever do come," Charmian
said to Cornelia, after her stepmother had made her excuses to Cornelia
for her friends being rather late, "and I don't think they're half as
uncertain to come as mamma does. Anyway, they're certain to stay, after
they get here, till you want to rise up and howl."
"My dear!" said Mrs. Maybough.
"Oh, I don't suppose I ever _shall_ howl. I'm too thoroughly subdued;
and with Cornelia here to-day I shall be able to hold in. You're the
first Synthesis girl," she frankly explained to Cornelia, "that mamma's
ever let me have. She thinks they spend all their time drawing the
nude."
Mrs. Maybough looked at Cornelia for the effect of this boldness upon
her, and the girl frowned to keep herself from laughing, and then gave
way. Mrs. Maybough smiled with a ladylike decorum which redeemed the
excess from impropriety. Charmian seemed to know the bounds of her
license, and as if Mrs. Maybough's smile had marked them, she went no
farther, and her mother began softly to question Cornelia about
herself. The girl perceived that Charmian had not told her anything
quite right concerning her, but had got everything dramatically and
picturesquely awry. She tried to keep Cornelia from setting the facts
straight, because it took all the romance out of them, and she said she
should always believe them as she had reported them. Cornelia knew from
novels that they were very humble facts, but she was prepared to abide
by them whatever a great society woman like Mrs. Maybough should think
of them. Mrs. Maybough seemed to think none the worse of them in the
simple angularity which Cornelia gave them.
Her friends began to come in at last, and Cornelia found herself, for
the first time, in a company of those modern nomads whom prosperity and
the various forms of indigestion have multiplied among us. They were
mostly people whom Mrs. Maybough had met in Europe, drinking different
waters and sampling divers climates, and they had lately arrived home,
or were just going abroad, or to Florida, or Colorado, or California.
The men were not so sick as the women, but they were prosperous, and
that was as good or as bad a reason for their homelessness. They
gradually withdrew from the ladies, and stirred their tea in groups of
their own sex, and talked investments; sometimes they spoke of their
diseases, or their hotels and steamers; and they took advice of each
other about places to go to if they went in this direction or that, but
said that, when it came to it they supposed they should go where their
wives decided. The ladies spoke of where they had met last, and of some
who had died since, or had got their daughters married; they professed
a generous envy of Mrs. Maybough for being so nicely settled, and said
that now they supposed she would always live in New York, unless, one
of them archly suggested, her daughter should be carried off somewhere;
if one had such a lovely daughter it was what one might expect to
happen, any day.