But Scarborough declined her invitation. However, he did come to
dinner ten days later; and Gladys, who had no lack of confidence in her
power to charm when and whom she chose, was elated by his friendliness
then and when she met him at other houses.
"He's not a bit sentimental," she told Pauline, whose silence whenever
she tried to discuss him did not discourage her. "But if he ever does
care for a woman he'll care in the same tremendous way that he sweeps
things before him in his career. Don't you think so?"
"Yes," said Pauline.
She had now lingered at Saint X two months beyond the time she
originally set. She told herself she had reached the limit of
endurance, that she must fly from the spectacle of Gladys' growing
intimacy with Scarborough; she told Gladys it was impossible for her
longer to neglect the new house in Fifth Avenue. With an effort she
added: "You'd rather stay on here, wouldn't you?"
"I detest New York," replied Gladys. "And I've never enjoyed myself in
my whole life as I'm enjoying it here."
So she went East alone, went direct to Dawn Hill, their country place
at Manhasset, Long Island, which Dumont never visited. She invited
Leonora Fanshaw down to stand between her thoughts and herself. Only
the society of a human being, one who was light-hearted and amusing,
could tide her back to any sort of peace in the old life--her books and
her dogs, her horseback and her drawing and her gardening. A life so
full of events, so empty of event. It left her hardly time for proper
sleep, yet it had not a single one of those vivid threads of intense
and continuous interest--and one of them is enough to make bright the
dullest pattern that issues from the Loom.
In her "splendor" her nearest approach to an intimacy had been with
Leonora.
She had no illusions about the company she was keeping in the East. To
her these "friends" seemed in no proper sense either her friends or one
another's. Drawn together from all parts of America, indeed of the
world, by the magnetism of millions, they had known one another not at
all or only slightly in the period of life when thorough friendships
are made; even where they had been associates as children, the
association had rarely been of the kind that creates friendship's
democratic intimacy. They had no common traditions, no real
class-feeling, no common enthusiasms--unless the passion for keeping
rich, for getting richer, for enjoying and displaying riches, could be
called enthusiasm. They were mere intimate acquaintances, making small
pretense of friendship, having small conception of it or desire for it
beyond that surface politeness which enables people whose selfish
interests lie in the same direction to get on comfortably together.
She divided them into two classes. There were those who, like herself,
kept up great establishments and entertained lavishly and engaged in
the courteous but fierce rivalry of fashionable ostentation. Then
there were those who hung about the courts of the rich, invited because
they filled in the large backgrounds and contributed conversation or
ideas for new amusements, accepting because they loved the atmosphere
of luxury which they could not afford to create for themselves.
Leonora was undeniably in the latter class. But she was associated in
Pauline's mind with the period before her splendor. She had been
friendly when Dumont was unknown beyond Saint X. The others sought
her--well, for the same reasons of desire for distraction and dread of
boredom which made her welcome them. But Leonora, she more than half
believed, liked her to a certain extent for herself--"likes me better
than I like her." And at times she was self-reproachful for being thus
exceeded in self-giving. Leonora, for example, told her her most
intimate secrets, some of them far from creditable to her. Pauline
told nothing in return. She sometimes longed for a confidant, or,
rather, for some person who would understand without being told, some
one like Olivia; but her imagination refused to picture Leonora as that
kind of friend. Even more pronounced than her frankness, and she was
frank to her own hurt, was her biting cynicism--it was undeniably
amusing; it did not exactly inspire distrust, but it put Pauline
vaguely on guard. Also, she was candidly mercenary, and, in some
moods, rapaciously envious. "But no worse," thought Pauline, "than so
many of the others here, once one gets below their surface. Besides,
it's in a good-natured, good-hearted way."
She wished Fanshaw were as rich as Leonora longed for him to be. She
was glad Dumont seemed to be putting him in the way of making a
fortune. He was distasteful to her, because she saw that he was an
ill-tempered sycophant under a pretense of manliness thick enough to
shield him from the unobservant eyes of a world of men and women greedy
of flattery and busy each with himself or herself. But for Leonora's
sake she invited him. And Leonora was appreciative, was witty, never
monotonous or commonplace, most helpful in getting up entertainments,
and good to look at--always beautifully dressed and as fresh as if just
from a bath; sparkling green eyes, usually with good-humored mockery in
them; hard, smooth, glistening shoulders and arms; lips a crimson line,
at once cold and sensuous.
On a Friday in December Pauline came up from Dawn Hill and, after two
hours at the new house, went to the jeweler's to buy a wedding present
for Aurora Galloway. As she was passing the counter where the
superintendent had his office, his assistant said: "Beg pardon, Mrs.
Dumont. The necklace came in this morning. Would you like to look at
it?"
She paused, not clearly hearing him. He took a box from the safe
behind him and lifted from it a magnificent necklace of graduated
pearls with a huge solitaire diamond clasp. "It's one of the finest we
ever got together," he went on. "But you can see for yourself." He
was flushing in the excitement of his eagerness to ingratiate himself
with such a distinguished customer.
"Beautiful!" said Pauline, taking the necklace as he held it out to
her. "May I ask whom it's for?"
The clerk looked puzzled, then frightened, as the implications of her
obvious ignorance dawned upon him.
"Oh--I--I----" He almost snatched it from her, dropped it into the
box, put on the lid. And he stood with mouth ajar and forehead beaded.
"Please give it to me again," said Pauline, coldly. "I had not
finished looking at it."
His uneasy eyes spied the superintendent approaching. He grew scarlet,
then white, and in an agony of terror blurted out: "Here comes the
superintendent. I beg you, Mrs. Dumont, don't tell him I showed it to
you. I've made some sort of a mistake. You'll ruin me if you speak of
it to any one. I never thought it might be intended as a surprise to
you. Indeed, I wasn't supposed to know anything about it. Maybe I was
mistaken----"
His look and voice were so pitiful that Pauline replied reassuringly:
"I understand--I'll say nothing. Please show me those," and she
pointed to a tray of unset rubies in the show-case.
And when the superintendent, bowing obsequiously, came up himself to
take charge of this important customer, she was deep in the rubies
which the assistant was showing her with hands that shook and fingers
that blundered.
She did not permit her feelings to appear until she was in her carriage
again and secure from observation. The clerk's theory she could not
entertain for an instant, contradicted as it was by the facts of eight
years. She knew she had surprised Dumont. She had learned nothing new;
but it forced her to stare straight into the face of that which she had
been ignoring, that which she must continue to ignore if she was to
meet the ever heavier and crueler exactions of the debt she had
incurred when she betrayed her father and mother and herself. At a
time when her mind was filled with bitter contrasts between what was
and what might have been, it brought bluntly to her the precise kind of
life she was leading, the precise kind of surroundings she was
tolerating.
"Whom can he be giving such a gift?" she wondered. And she had an
impulse to confide in Leonora to the extent of encouraging her to hint
who it was. "She would certainly know. No doubt everybody knows,
except me."
She called for her, as she had promised, and took her to lunch at
Sherry's. But the impulse to confide died as Leonora talked--of money,
of ways of spending money; of people who had money, and those who
hadn't money; of people who were spending too much money, of those who
weren't spending enough money; of what she would do if she had money,
of what many did to get money. Money, money, money--it was all of the
web and most of the woof of her talk. Now it ran boldly on the surface
of the pattern; now it was half hid under something about art or books
or plays or schemes for patronizing the poor and undermining their
self-respect--but it was always there.
For the first time Leonora jarred upon her fiercely--unendurably. She
listened until the sound grew indistinct, became mingled with the
chatter of that money-flaunting throng. And presently the chatter
seemed to her to be a maddening repetition of one word, money--the
central idea in all the thought and all the action of these people. "I
must get away," she thought, "or I shall cry out." And she left
abruptly, alleging that she must hurry to catch her train.
Money-mad! her thoughts ran on. The only test of honor--money, and
ability and willingness to spend it. They must have money or they're
nobodies. And if they have money, who cares where it came from? No
one asks where the men get it--why should any one ask where the women
get it?