HE SPEAKS THE MERE CONTRARY.
Love's Labor's Lost; i.--I.
Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson sat in her bower, enveloped in an
unaccustomed air of respectability, and in a frame of mind exceedingly
self-satisfied and serene. She had secured a visit from a New York
relative, a distant cousin whose acquaintance she had made in the
mountains the summer before, and she hoped from this circumstance to
secure much social advantage. For at home Miss Frances Merrivale moved
in circles such as her present hostess could only gaze at from afar
with burning envy. In her own city, Miss Merrivale would certainly
never have consented to know Mrs. Sampson, relationship or no
relationship; but she chanced to wish to get away from home for a week
or two, she thought somewhat wistfully of the devotion of Fred Rangely
at the mountains last summer, and she was not without a hope that if
she once appeared in Boston, the Staggchases, who should have invited
her to visit them long ago, she being as nearly related to Mr.
Staggchase as to Mrs. Sampson, might be moved to ask her to come to
stay with them.
It cannot be said that Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson, dashing, vulgar
social adventurer that she was, had much in common with her guest. Miss
Merrivale, it is true, had the incurable disease of social ambition as
thoroughly as her hostess; but the girl had, at least, a recognized and
very comfortable footing under her feet, while the unfortunate widow
kept herself above the surface only by nimble but most tiresome leaps
from one precarious floating bit to another. In these matters,
moreover, a few degrees make really an immense difference. There is all
the inequality which exists between the soldier who wields his sword in
a disastrous hollow, and one who strikes triumphant blows from the
hillock above. The elevation is to be measured in inches, perhaps, but
that range reaches from failure to success. Whether social ambition is
proper pride or vulgar presumption depends not upon the feeling itself
so much as upon the grade from which it is exercised, and Miss
Merrivale very quickly understood that while she was placed upon one
side of the dividing line between the two, her hostess was unhappily to
be found upon the other.
Indeed Miss Frances had hardly recognized what Mrs. Sampson's
surroundings were until she found herself established in the little
apartment as a guest of that lady. Her newly found cousin had at the
mountains spoken of her father, the late judge, and of her own
acquaintances among the great and well known of Boston, with an air
which carried conviction to one who had not known her too long. She
spoke with playful pathos of her poverty, it is true, but when a
woman's gowns will pass muster, talk of poverty is not likely to be
taken too seriously. Miss Merrivale knew, moreover, that the widow,
like herself, could boast a connection with the Staggchase family.
Now she found herself at the top of an apartment house in a street of
Nottingham lace curtains carefully draped back to show the Rogers'
groups on neat marble stands behind their precise folds. The awful gulf
which yawned between this South End location and the region where abode
those whom she counted her own kind socially, was apparent to her the
moment she arrived and looked about her. Fred Rangely had called, but
Mrs. Sampson had regaled her guest with such tales of his devotion to
Mrs. Staggchase that Miss Merrivale received him with much coldness,
and his call was not a success. Now she was impatiently waiting for the
appearance of Mrs. Staggchase, who, it did not occur to her to doubt,
would of course call. She was curious to see her relative, and her
fondness for Rangely, such as it was, was marvellously quickened by the
presence of a rival in the field. Instead of the appearance of Mrs.
Staggchase, however, came a note asking Miss Merrivale to dine, whereat
that young woman was angry, and her hostess, although she was too
clever to show it, was secretly furious.
This invitation was the result of a conversation between Mr. and Mrs.
Richard Staggchase, which had begun by that gentleman's asking his wife
at dinner when she was going to call upon Miss Merrivale.
"Not at all, my dear," Mrs. Staggchase answered, "as long as she is
visiting that dreadful Mrs. Sampson, I'm not sure, Fred, but that if I
had known that creature could claim a cousinship to you, I should have
refused to marry you."
"She is a dose," Mr. Staggchase admitted. "I wonder where she lives
now. Didn't Frances Merrivale send her address?"
"She lives on Catawba Street, at the top of a speaking tube in one of
those dreadful apartment houses where you shout up the tube and they
open the door for you by electricity. I wonder how soon it will be,
Fred, before you'll drop in a nickel at the door of an apartment house
and the person you want to see will be slid out to you on a platform."
"Gad! That wouldn't be a bad scheme," her husband returned, with an
appreciative grin. "But, really now, what are you going to do about
this girl. She's a sort of cousin, you know, and she's a great friend
of the Livingstons."
"We might ask her to come here after she gets through with that woman.
I'll write her if you like."
"Without calling?" Mr. Staggchase asked, lifting his eyebrows a little.
"My dear," his wife responded, "I try to do my duty in that estate in
life to which I have been appointed, and I am willing to made all
possible exceptions to all known rules in favor of your family; but
Mrs. Sampson is an impossible exception. I will do nothing that shows
her that I am conscious of her existence."
"But it will be awfully rude not to call."
"One can't be rude to such creatures as Mrs. Sampson," returned Mrs.
Staggchase, with unmoved decision. "She is one of those dreadful women
who watch for a recognition as a cat watches for a mouse. I've seen her
at the theatre. She'd pick out one person and run him down with her
great bold eyes until he had to bow to her, and then she'd stalk
another in the same way. Call or her, indeed! Why, Fred, she'd invite
you to a dinner _tete-a-tete_ to-day, if she thought you'd go."
Mr. Staggchase laughed rather significantly.
"Gad! that might be amusing. She is of the kittle cattle, my dear, but
you must own that she's a well-built craft."
"Oh, certainly," replied his better half, who was too canny by far to
show annoyance, if indeed she felt any, when her husband praised
another woman. "If everybody isn't aware of her good points, it isn't
that she is averse to advertising them. She has taken up with young
Stanton, the sculptor, just because some of us have been interested in
him."
"Is he going to make the _America_ statue?"
"That is still uncertain, but for my part I half hope he won't, if that
Sampson woman is his kind."
Mr. Staggchase dipped his long fingers into his finger bowl, wiped them
with great deliberation and then pushed his chair back from the table.
It was very seldom that his wife denied a request he made her, but when
she did he knew better than to contend in the matter.
"Very well," he said, "you may do whatever you please. Whether you
women are so devilish hard on each other because you know your own sex
is more than I should undertake to say."
"Are you going out?"
"Yes," he answered, "I have got to go to a meeting of the Executive
Committee of the St. Filipe. There is some sort of a row; I don't know
what. How are you going to amuse yourself."
"By doing my duty."
"Do you find duty amusing then; I shouldn't have suspected it."
"Oh, duty's only another name for necessity. I'm going to the theatre
with Fred Rangely. He wrote an article for the _Observer_ in favor of
that great booby Stanton's having the statue. It was a very lukewarm
plea, but I asked him to do it, and as a reward"--
"He is allowed the inestimable boon of taking you to the theatre,"
finished her husband, "I must say, Dian, that you are, on the whole,
the shrewdest woman I know."
"Thank you. I must be just, you know," she returned smiling as
brilliantly as if her husband were to be won again.
It was not without reason that Mrs. Staggchase had spoken of herself
and her husband as a model couple. Given her theory of married life,
nothing could be more satisfactory and consistent than the way in which
she lived up to it. Her ideal of matrimony was a sort of mutual
_laisser faire_, conducted with the utmost propriety and politeness.
She made an especial point of being as attractive to her husband as to
any other man; and she had the immense advantage of never having been
in love with anybody but herself and of being philosophical enough not
to consider the good things of conversation wasted if they were said
for his exclusive benefit. She had no children, and had once remarked
in answer to the question whether she regretted this, "There must be
some pleasure in having sons old enough to flirt with you; but I don't
know of anything else I have lost that I have reason to regret."
Her husband, thorough man of the world as he was, and indeed perhaps
for that very reason, never outgrew a pleased surprise that he found
his wife so perennially entertaining. He was not unwilling that she
should exercise her fascinations on others when she chose, since he had
no feeling toward her sufficiently warm to engender anything like
jealousy; but he appreciated her to the full.
He rose from his seat and walked to the sideboard, where he selected a
cigar.
"I must say," he observed, between the puffs as he lighted it, "that
you are justice incarnate. You have always kept accounts squared with
me most beautifully."
Mrs. Staggchase laughed softly, toying with the tiny spoon of Swiss
carved silver with which she had stirred her coffee. Her husband had
expressed perfectly her theory of marital relations. She balanced
accounts in her mind with the most scrupulous exactness, and was an
admirable debtor if a somewhat unrelenting creditor. She had a definite
standard by which she measured her obligations to Mr. Staggchase, and
she never allowed herself to fall short in the measure she gave him.
She was fond of him in a conveniently mild and reasonable fashion, and
a marriage founded upon mutual tolerance, if it is likely never to be
intensely happy, is also likely to be a pretty comfortable one. Mrs.
Staggchase paid to her husband all her tithes of mint and anise and
cumin, and she even sometimes presented him with a propitiatory
offering in excess of her strict debt; only such a gift was always set
down in her mental record as a gift and not as a tribute.
"This Stanton is an awful lout, Fred," she observed. "Perhaps he can
make a good statue of _America_, but if he can it will be because he is
so thoroughly the embodiment of the vulgar and pushing side of American
character."
"Then why in the world are you pushing him?"
"Oh, because Mrs. Ranger and Anna Frostwinch want him pushed. I don't
know but they may believe in him. Mrs. Ranger does, of course, but the
dear old soul knows no more about art than I do about Choctaw. As to
the statues, I don't think it makes much difference, they are always
laughed at, and I don't think anybody could make one in this age that
wouldn't be found fault with."
"Nobody nowadays knows enough about sculpture to criticise it
intelligently," Staggchase remarked, somewhat oracularly, "and the only
safe thing left is to find fault."
"That is just about it, and so it may as well be this booby as anybody
else that gets the commission. It isn't respectable for the town not to
have statues, of course."
Mr. Staggchase moved toward the door.
"Well," he said, "I don't know who's in the fight, but I'll bet on your
side. Good night. I hope virtue will be its own reward."
"Oh, it always is," retorted his wife. "I especially make it a point
that it shall be."