"My good girl," said Mrs. Bates, impressively, "this whole function has
only one object. That object is to show your sister for five minutes to
Cecilia Ingles."
"Oh, that's it?"
"That's it, and all of it."
Mrs. Bates's function came off on the appointed afternoon, and was so
limited in size and so simple in character that Eliza Marshall would have
reproached herself for slighting her own child, had not Susan Bates,
before her early departure, whispered in the old lady's ear a word of
complete approbation.
Rosy herself flashed and sparkled in the dim and depressing old parlor
like a garnet set in dull gold. Indeed, it must be confessed that she
showed some of the hard glitter of such a jewelled fabrication, as well
as its splendor. Cecilia Ingles, who could not but admire her beauty and
her readiness, thought that her tone was a little too hard, and that in
her excess of aplomb she pushed self-possession to the verge of
self-assertion. Rosy, in fact, entered society not with the tentative
step and slow advance of one who cautiously feels an unaccustomed way,
but by a single confident and intuitive leap. As she stood there beside
her mother, dressed in a pale yellow gown and playing carelessly with her
bunch of red roses, she shifted any embarrassment incident to the
occasion from her own shoulders to those of her mother's friends--two or
three of whom, retired and aging persons, withdrew feeling their own
social rustiness quite keenly.
Jane, who had no definite rôle to play, but who did general utility all
over the house, was enabled to observe various episodes from various
points of view. When the actual test came she had little more aptitude
for the social graces than her mother had, and she imitated her mother's
own cautious reserve. She did not meet Mrs. Ingles at all, but she
witnessed from a distant doorway the conjunction which Mrs. Bates
effected between the leading luminary of the day and the newly-discovered
asteroid. Jane ungrudgingly acknowledged Cecilia Ingles to be
magnificently beautiful, and her dress to be a miracle of taste, and her
advances to be most winningly gracious. "And she's just about my own age,
too," thought poor Jane, in half-unconscious comparison. "And the way
that little chit stands up there and talks to her! I couldn't, for a
hundred worlds. Rosy acts as if she was just as pretty herself--well, I
suppose she is; and of just as good position--h'm, _that's_ all
right enough, I'm sure; and just as used to the ways of the world--well,
so she will be, fast enough." And the dear girl gave a long slow
sigh--partly that the family had at last such a champion, partly that she
herself should have been doomed to such complete uselessness in so high a
cause. She quite failed to realize that she alone and no other was the
real motive-power of her family's tardy spurt.
As for Mrs. Bates, Jane caught quite another side of her. She showed
herself profoundly formal and punctilious. She seemed to have dilated for
the occasion, with the express determination of dominating it. "She acts
mighty queer," said honest Jane, who was the same to one and all, to-day
and tomorrow; "but I suppose she knows what tone to take. If she acts
like that, though, the next time I see her, I shall want to stop knowing
her. She calls it a 'function,' and I suppose she's trying to make it
like one. But one's enough."
Jane observed, furthermore, that her aunt Lydia was inclined to neglect
her own part in the ceremony in order to perform pirouettes and
pigeon-wings (so to speak) before the backgammon-player of the tropics.
"If Aunt Lyddy forgets, after all," said Jane, anxiously, "and _does_
mention Florida, why, I've told a fib for nothing." Jane had informed
Mrs. Rhodes that the Bateses had lost their youngest child at
Jacksonville, and so could not bear the slightest mention of the South;
though she knew perfectly well that the youngest child of the Bateses was
a lusty youth of eighteen, with strong hopes of becoming one of the Yale
football team next season.
In the midst of the ceremonial Truesdale sauntered in and passed through
the rooms with a graceful indifference; he was the last to be
disconcerted by an assemblage purely feminine. He had doffed for the hour
most of his imported eccentricities in the way of dress, and had
consented to appear, properly enough, in a double-breasted black
frock-coat with extremely long skirts. He had an orchid in his
button-hole--a large one, very vivid and flamboyant. Jane had looked,
rather, for a chrysanthemum--one of those immeasurable blooms worn by the
young men in _Life_. "But Dick _will_ be individual," she acknowledged.
"Thank goodness it wasn't a peony, or worse. He _does_ look nice, if he
is my brother; and he's the only young man I know with violet eyes."
Truesdale drifted into the tea-room, and Jane presently saw him lounging
in a chair alongside Bertie Patterson. The table was officered after the
fashion that Mrs. Bates had suggested--by Mrs. Belden, who, in the
absence of her own daughter, kept away by illness, had brought, instead,
another girl, her daughter's friend, a visitor from New York. Truesdale
failed to catch her name.
Mrs. Belden herself was somewhat large and inclined to be a bit
high-colored and full-blown. An excess of blond down lined her cheeks
just below and before her ears, and her light-colored eyebrows spread
themselves rather broadly and dispersedly on her forehead. A superfluity
of straw-colored hair, of a shade essentially improbable waved about her
ears and temples, and a high gold comb emphasized the loose knot into
which it was drawn behind. "She would do better on the stage," Truesdale
said to himself; "she has gotten herself up for the photographer. And if
all those rings are her own, she has more than any one woman needs."
The girl with her, whose name presently came to him as Gladys--"Gladys
what?" he wondered--let herself loose on him at once with a fusillade of
ready familiarities. The field was clear, for Bertie Patterson, at his
side, had few words to interpose. Her large brown eyes rested half
appealingly upon him in the intervals of her constrained and halting
little service, and he readily divined the poor child as in a lonely and
uncomfortable minority.
"To-day is only my second time," she said to him, with a kind of
appealing protest; "you mustn't watch me and criticise me." She had just
finished her ministrations on a pair of old-time family friends whom
Rosy, in the fulness of her social efflorescence, had banished for
consolation and reassurance to the tea-room. Somehow, the guests that had
fallen to her side of the table had all been of this character. "When was
the first?"
"Why, don't you know? The day you--you--"
"Oh, _that_ day!" laughed Truesdale. "I didn't know you were there, of
course. You must have thought me absurd."
"No; not--not--absurd. But on such a long, wide street, with so many
handsome houses all around--"
Truesdale smiled. "Poor little thing! I believe she admires Michigan
Avenue; I believe she's impressed by it." To him this thoroughfare was
not completely innocent of the cheap and vulgar restlessness which is the
dominant note of all American street architecture. "But let her admire
it, if she can. Think what I expected to find Piccadilly!"
"I enjoy driving down it so much," she continued, confidentially, yet
with a shy little look as if trying to learn whether her confidence was
misplaced. "Aunt Lydia and I go shopping almost every day."
"Ten kilometres down and back," estimated Truesdale; "ten kilometres of
luxury and grandeur--don't let it overpower you. And you are learning
where the shops are, I suppose, and the theatres, and the post-office,
perhaps, and the hotels, and what all besides."
"No," said Bertie Patterson, proudly; "I knew all that before I came.
There are books, you know--and maps. I studied them at home beforehand."
Truesdale had never seen any of the books, but he thought their existence
probable enough. He remembered, to, his own maps--how he had become
familiar with the London clubs long before walking through Pall Mall, and
how he knew where to find all the Paris theatres years previous to his
first stroll along the Boulevard. "And you have been to all the high
places, I suppose?"
"I've been to the top of the Masonic Temple."
"And to the places were they have the sun-dials, and the gates ajar, and
the American flag made of--of--Heaven knows what?"
"The parks? Yes, we have been to one or two of them, but we were a little
late for all those lovely things; most of them had been dug up."
"Lovely things!" groaned Truesdale. "Fancy them in the Bois or along the
Row--or anywhere but here!" Yet he felt sure that she had his own
fondness for pleasure-grounds and points of view. She had doubtless
anticipated the Masonic Temple and Washington Park, just as he had
anticipated the Pincian and the Tower of the Capitol. His fellow-feeling
forgave her this crudity; after all, she was praising what she had never
seen.
"I've been to your parks myself," the other girl broke in, as she glanced
round the vase of chrysanthemums from the other side of the table. "But
if you want to see a park, come to New York." She was rather abrupt and
boisterous; Truesdale wondered if she had not at one time been a tomboy.
"And I know where ever so many of the society people live," Bertie went
on in a low tone, which implored him not to repeat, and above all not to
laugh. "I saw a book once with all their addresses, and I marked the
places on the map."
Truesdale did smile here--crumbling, the while, a biscuit on the corner
of the table. He smiled, not because she had seemed to refer to society
people as a distinct and unique order of beings, but from pure sympathy.
He himself had placed Stafford House and Bridgewater House and all the
other town residences of the English aristocracy in those same days when
he had found sites for the Pall Mall clubs.
"Yes," she went on, "I know where Mrs. Bates lives, and Mrs. Ingles, and
lots of other prominent people."
"Upon my word!" cried Truesdale, in generous emulation. "Just what I did
in Paris. I went all up and down the Rue de Crenelle and the Rue St.
Dominique trying to select the right sort of hotels--houses, you
know--for the Viscountess of Beauseant and the Duchess of Langeais and
the Princess Galathionne, and all those great ladies in Balzac--in
Balzac's novels," he added, considerately.
"But Mrs. Bates isn't in a novel?"
"Oh no; she's real, I hope. So you have covered the North side and the
South side and all? You know us through and through?"
"This talk about 'sides'!" the girl opposite broke in again. She took the
other way round the chrysanthemums. "We have 'sides' in New York, but
nobody you know lives on them. Fancy nice people scattered in squads all
over a city and having their shops and clubs and theatres all jumbled up
in the middle along with everything else! It's horrid."
Truesdale nodded across to the girl and smiled brightly. He wondered if
she were really quite second-rate.
"Where do you suppose I went night before last with Aunt Lydia?" Bertie
resumed, as she fingered the remaining two or three of a row of shining
teaspoons. "To the opera"--in an awe-struck undertone; "to _Rig-o-letto_.
Aunt Lydia couldn't get a box--she said they were all taken for the
season; but we had seats close to one side, just below the boxes. Such a
grand place! Ever since the Auditorium was opened I've been hoping to see
it, and now I have."
"Congratulations!" cried Truesdale, heartily, and Mrs. Belden turned
round to see the reason for it. He remembered how he himself had panted
for the Scala, and for the Apollo at Rome--that poor Apollo, razed to the
ground before ever he could behold its historic stage.
"I've been to your opera myself," the other girl proclaimed. "What was
the matter with all the box people, anyway? They seemed afraid to assert
themselves. I never saw a lot of rich people so cowed-like."
"Do you mean that they kept quiet during the performance?" asked
Truesdale. "The effect _was_ rather primitive, wasn't it? Whenever
_I_ sing I always ask the whole room to shout-especially if somebody
shows any sign of listening."
"And I thought they looked pretty plain, too," the girl volunteered
further. "If you want to see style and display, take the Metropolitan on
a real gala night. I didn't see half a dozen necklaces among your
people--and not a single tiara."
"You should have worn yours," declared Truesdale, genially. "Every one
would have helped." Yes, she seemed second-rate, truly, and the worst
type of a second-rate person at that--the second-rate person away from
home. "Let _her_ have them," he whispered to Bertie, as a brace of
new-comers crossed the threshold.
"She'll take them anyway," said Bertie, ruefully. She did not at all seem
to realize the greater triumph of completely monopolizing the one man
present.
"I wanted to walk in the foy--in the place where they promenade," Bertie
went on; "such a lovely place, and such a grand crush under all those
yellow arches! But we didn't have any gentleman," she concluded, lamely.
"Never mind; you'll have one next time," responded Truesdale; gallantly.
"I'm awfully fond of that place, already--the whole of it. It's one of
the few good things they've got here. It's the only place in town where
you can see any number of nice people together."
"Oh, really," protested Mrs. Belden, speaking to him for the first time.
She had decided that he was worth talking to, as well as concluded that
his attentions had been given too exclusively to one side of the table.
"Oh, really, now!" Her voice was thickly, sweetly sibilant. "I shall hope
to show you that you are wrong. Gladys, child, remind me to send this
young man a card for a week from Wednesday."
"Very well," answered Truesdale; "I'm perfectly willing to be convinced.
Only don't ask me to a dinner--I can't sit through a dinner. A little bit
of a tea--well, that's different." And he turned his friendly eyes in the
direction of Bertie Patterson.
"It isn't a dinner," said Mrs. Belden, as brusquely as her vocalization
would allow. "It's--" But a new-comer advanced, and she turned to
manipulate her teapot with her large, fair, plump hands.
Bertie Patterson smiled at Truesdale in return. She seemed to consider
herself indebted to him not only for that vague promise of future
festivities, but for a certain degree of moral support at a juncture
which might have brought her mortification, if not actual tears.
"What a downright nice little soul she is, anyway!" thought Truesdale.
"There are nice good girls in this world, after all, and some of them are
right here. And how she idealizes this brutal and ugly town! If only she
doesn't idealize _me_!"
Truesdale had been idealized more than once before. Sometimes the result
had been merely embarrassing, sometimes disastrous.