III.
Kindness of heart is one of the virtues which is made to do duty for many minor faults, and when Marie Louise opened the Sunday Watch-Dog on the morning of the day on which she was to lunch with Miss Bowles, she really feared she had erred through too easy amiability. A full-length portrait of herself in evening dress took up one of the outside pages, labeled, “Miss Marie Louise Carman, multimillionaire, philanthropist, and débutante.” The rather weak climax did not strike Marie Louise, who was taken up with the second word in the series. She could hardly believe, as she saw it in print, that she had allowed herself to mention her offer to the hospital board before it had even been accepted.
“They are so fiendishly clever, mommer,” she had explained to her mother—“these reporters.”
Unquestionably the representatives of the press have their abilities, but there had been something extraordinarily soothing to Marie Louise, fresh from a group of people who made her feel crude and unimportant, in the point of view of one who never questioned that it was greatness to live in a marble-fronted house, and magnificent to buy without asking the price.
Mrs. Carman sat down and laughed, or, rather, chuckled faintly, at her daughter's discomfiture. Detachment could not have gone further.
“They never bothered me but once. When your father ran away, Mr. Keats, of the Stonehurst Star, came round to see me, but I just said: ‘Mr. Keats, I ain't a-going to tell you anything,” and so he went away again.”
Mrs. Carman was, in her way, a much more important person than her daughter. She was short and stout; her face had never been pretty, and, as she grew older, the heaviness of her line of jaw, so usual in American faces, had been accentuated. Her hair, still brown, was parted, and her whole expression was one of extreme motherliness tempered by shrewd common sense. Nevertheless, her attitude to Marie Louise had never appeared to be conspicuously motherly since the period of childish diseases had been outgrown, In Stonehurst she was accused of neglecting the girl, or, at least, of leaving her culpably independent—an independence that had naturally increased since Marie Louise’s accession to fortune. She had been known to smile, or even to flutter an eyelid, over some of her daughter’s eccentricities, as if she herself had had nothing to do with bringing up so undisciplined a member of society.
Yet one could not say that Mrs. Carman was merely dragged against her will at the wheels of Marie Louise’s chariot. On the contrary, the elder women enjoyed seeing the world more than the younger. Before her marriage she had gone once to Europe with her father, the cashier, and, though she had seen nothing off the beaten track, she remembered it all with an accuracy that more extended travelers might envy, and she still corresponded with some of the acquaintances she had made. She had, in a way, a faculty for making friends. The summer before, while Marie Louise had been driving, sullen and ignored, about Newport, Mrs. Carman might often have been seen stepping out with her knitting-bag to take supper with friends in the town. She had entered into conversation with them coming over in the boat from the mainland, and the acquaintance had ripened.
But though she left her daughter free to manage her life her own way, she was never led into the mistake of regarding herself as a pensioner, The reason was simple. She had been perfectly content with her life at Stonehurst. If any favors had been conferred, it was she who had conferred them in being willing to move.
She never altered her mode of dress for hour, season, occasion, or bank-account. She wore a long skirt (which in wet weather she pinned up with safety-pins), and above it a garment which would have resembled a dressing-sack, had it not been made, like the skirt, of heavy black silk. Across her shoulders she sometimes threw a lace scarf—she had, indeed, a wonderful knowledge and appreciation of lace. She wore three rings, a black enamel band, in which was set a diamond that looked like a pebble, an amethyst with her initials in diamonds on it, and a ring of her mother’s hair. No persuasion of Marie Louise’s could induce her to replace them with anything more modern.
Now she folded her hands upon the curves of her person and observed her daughter, who in the most elaborate of frilled lace petticoats was in the act of placing an amber-colored comb in her amber-colored hair with the precision of an artist.
“‘Philanthropist,’” she murmured reflectively.
Marie Louise was not at all disturbed by her mother’s ridicule. She took up her hand-glass and studied the effect of the back of her yellow head before she answered. In her earlier days a silver set for her dressing-table had been the one thing of all others which she desired, and in the first flush of her fortune she had bought one. But her taste had quickly progressed beyond it, and she had replaced it by ivory and gold, while the silver set was relegated to the “guest-room,” where, for obvious reasons, it was never seen.
Satisfied with the result, she laid down the mirror, and said with the utmost good temper:
“Now, mommer, you let me alone. I am enjoying myself my own way, and not doing any harm, am I?”
No, Mrs. Carman expressed her belief that in housing sick babies her daughter was wiser than in many other expenditures, and her eye rested on the creation in brilliant blue which the maid was shaking out before slipping it over the head of Marie Louise.
To tell the truth, Mrs. Carman thought her daughter’s clothes terrible beyond expression, but she never commented on them, and when presently, in all her blue finery, with a nodding hat to match, Marie Louise drove away in her little victoria, Mrs. Carman watched her out of sight with a smile of the most dispassionate amusement.
Marie Louise was not twenty minutes late by design, but quite simply, because she had taken longer to dress than she had expected. Her estimate of half an hour was founded on old Stonehurst days, when the change of a sash or the mending of a tear was the utmost complication that could arise. Now veils and slippers and petticoats to match different costumes and different coiffures for different hats left her always behind time.
By a quarter before two the other guests of Miss Bowles had begun to be very impatient.
“Who are we waiting for, Serena?” asked Mrs. Emmons. “Not the little Italian, I hope. He was an hour late somewhere the other evening. Really, people like that ought to be insured—underwritten, guaranteed as to their punctuality, before any one accepts an invitation to meet them. I hate to wait for meals. Why wouldn’t that be a good profession for you, Jerry—to assure desirable guests arriving on time?”
“I sometimes wish I had a profession,” said Orvice. “It lets you out of so many tiresome things—to be busy.”
“You have a profession,” said Mrs. Emmons; “one of the best, only it’s like discovering the north pole; you can only do it once.”
“Some day you must tell me what it is,” said Jerry, turning over the newspapers which were lying on a table near him.
“I'll tell you now,” said Miss Bowles. “It’s marrying an heiress.”
A slight change of expression, which in any one else would have been annoyance, crossed Orvice’s face, but he said, without looking up: “Oh, do you call that a profession, or merely a necessity?”
“Well, if it’s a necessity,” returned his hostess, “you ought to be all the more grateful to me. Make the best of your chances. We are waiting for Miss Carman.”
“Now what do I know about her?” cried Mrs. Emmons. “What is it I know, Bill?”
“Nothing that I know,” answered Mr. Emmons sadly.
“How true that is,” said his wife. “But hasn’t she been getting divorced, or going on the stage, or something? Why do I seem to have heard the name?”
For answer Orvice unfolded the Watch-Dog and held it before Mrs. Emmons’ eyes.
“A very pretty woman,” he observed critically.
And it was on this tableau that Marie Louise entered.
“I am so sorry I'm late,” she began. “Is that clock right—ten minutes to two?”
“And I haven’t had any breakfast,” said Orvice.
Miss Bowles introduced them, and, Marie Louise’s eyes falling on the paper, she went on hastily:
“Oh, you have that dreadful thing. What do you do with these reporters? What do you do, Mrs. Emmons?”
Mrs. Emmons’ manner had undergone a very slight change, that often follows the entrance of another woman, for Miss Bowles hardly counted.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” she said, “what I should do, but I am sure I should be enormously flattered if any paper wanted my picture, but they never ask me, do they, Bill?”
“They must ask the photographers,” said Bill gravely.
“Oh,” said Orvice, “your picture is part of the office furniture, Mrs. Bill, like the red ink and the office cat.”
“How disagreeable you are, Jerry,” answered Mrs. Emmons, not at all disturbed. “You know I hate to have my picture in the paper.”
“You must have a horrid life,” said Orvice.
Jerome Orvice was a person about whom there was a great deal of difference of opinion. By some men he was frankly disliked, on the ground of his being “fresh,” and by a smaller number of women, who implied that they had had experiences! Certainly their repetition of his utterances was inexcusable. Yet he went wherever it struck him as amusing to go, belonged to more clubs than he could use, and had a general air of having much to give and little to receive that explained the irritation of those who disliked him. His friends asserted that the only reason why he was unpopular with any one was his excessive candor, which the gravity of his habitual expression bore out; for freshness is connected with exhilaration and a certain misplaced gaiety; while with Jerry a smile was rare.
He had gone through college idly but not ill, and now at twenty-four seemed perfectly content to live in his mother’s house in the enjoyment of a very small income left to him by an adoring great-aunt. This, as his detractors pointed out, was not the conduct of a particularly valuable person; and the fact that his mother loved him of course proved nothing at all. Yet, though not at all popular, he had a gift for the most unlikely friendships, ranging from college dons to Japanese generals. Every summer while he was at college he had gone abroad. Once he spent two months with an Englishman in a remote part of Burma. Not even his own family discovered for years that the gentleman was one of the great lights of the civil service. Mrs. Orvice had become quite inured to Jerry’s cool, “Oh, mother, there’s a fellow here who was awfully civil to me in” Egypt or Cuba as the case might be. “Would it be an awful bore to ask him to dine?” These occasions gradually lost their terror for her in the certainty that she would hear from these stray strangers a flattering estimate of her son, or perhaps only see their faces light up when he entered. Sometimes, of course, their parties included wives, daughters, or sisters, who invariably called Jerry by his first name, and could give no pleasure to his mother inasmuch as they belonged to the sex whose admiration is not a compliment but a menace. Of late, however, Mrs. Orvice had come to the encouraging conclusion that Jerry was fickle—telling it to herself as if it were the crown of virtues—as indeed perhaps it is, in a son. Yet women should beware of flattering themselves with this belief, merely because their sons fail to live up to the passions invented for them. It was more Mrs. Orvice’s judgment than Jerry's constancy that was at fault; and she often accused him of having got over passions that had existed only in her own timorous imagination.
As they sat down at the lunch-table (the party consisted of only the Emmonses, Peale, Jerry, and Miss Carman), Mrs. Emmons turned to Marie Louise
“I hear you have taken the Washburn house,” she said. “I think you are so sensible.”
“Sensible!” echoed the girl. The adjective surprised her. She would have understood “extravagant,” “fortunate,” but “sensible!” Mrs. Emmons, taking her astonishment for disagreement, went on glibly:
"Oh, yes, sensible. You must acknowledge that the servants’ arrangements are perfect, which is ever so much more important than the decorations, and you don’t have to live in your own hall.”
Now the entrance-hall had been Marie Louise’s special admiration. It was faced in black marble shot with green, with two unnecessary columns and a marble table to match. She had thought it very dignified and magnificent, and, having thrown some white bearskin rugs and a tiger or two on the marble floor, she had been thoroughly satisfied with the result. She now looked, as she felt, puzzled.
“You don’t like it?” she asked, so seriously that no one doubted she was in fun.
“I’m not brave enough to like it,” said Jerry. “It frightens me so, I am always expecting to meet Nero behind one of the columns, and to be thrown to the lions or something.”
“Well, with all its faults, it’s a good house for entertaining,” said Mrs. Emmons; “and I hope you are going to give a ball.”
“But I don’t know any one to ask,” said the girl.
The next instant she could have bitten out her tongue. She had spoken on the impulse of the minute, through her natural love of being a little dramatic, a little startling. There had seemed to be something piquant in telling these people plainly that she not of them. But of course it was only piquant if they were saying to themselves: “What, this pretty, well-dressed, brilliant young creature knows no one!” If, on the other hand, they felt merely that she was an insignificant enough little outsider the point was entirely lost.
The moment was something of a turning-point. Miss Bowles had asked the girl to luncheon through a variety of reasons, partly through kindness of heart and partly through obstinacy. Having become more or less her champion before she had seen her, she found that the attitude persisted. The little party had been carefully chosen. The Emmonses, if by good luck they took a fancy to her, could be the greatest help; Peale, because he liked so few people that his indifference could do no harm, while his liking a great deal of good; and Jerry Orvice, because the attentions of that sort of young man made a girl more enviable than anything else, in Miss Bowles’ opinion, to say nothing of the prospect of so advantageous a marriage for Jerry.
Miss Bowles had felt very confident of success when Marie Louise entered in the blue and gold finery of her dress and hair. But the girl’s last sentence turned her cold. Of course, Miss Bowles said to herself, it is perfectly evident that she knows no one, but why make every one feel awkward by saying so?
To the two men, however, it appeared to appeal differently. Prixley Peale, who had not been much impressed before, began to be at last a little amused. He had seen so much of the more complicated forms of social maneuvering, that Marie Louise’s candid operations had something of the same interest that an old criminal judge might feel in coming unexpectedly on a pickpocket at work. It was all as frank and open as a child’s eyes in a toy-shop.
Orvice, on the other hand, did not see it as exactly amusing. He found it pathetic, and felt inclined to blame society, or, rather, Miss Bowles and Mrs. Emmons as its representatives. Why did not some one tell her how little any one was worth knowing, how little the whole game was worth playing, even when you won? But, at the same time, he found himself eager that she should have what she wanted, and, to further this end, he and Prixley were presently urging her to let them give her a joint party—to take any form she chose, to include any one she wanted.
One did not have to be very long in the room with Jerry and Mrs. Emmons to be aware that she always followed his lead, and she was soon drawn into the discussion of who should be asked, while, naturally, Miss Bowles was not to be kept out.
Marie Louise listened with the intense interest of the willing scholar. She was dumfounded to hear the lightness with which the names, which she had supposed from reading the papers were of the utmost importance, were here dismissed or not even mentioned. One was a good old soul, but gave such dreary parties; and this of parties to which Marie Louise had looked as the very apex of her ambition. Another might “do very well if you were having a hundred, but not for anything really small.” The girl began to see how infinitely more complicated it all was than it seemed from the outside. She felt vaguely alarmed. If it did not count for anything to be well known and rich, and a giver of large entertainments, how could it count for very much to be just rich and nothing else?
“Well, of course, the truth of the whole matter is,” Mrs. Emmons was saying, “that it doesn’t make near so much difference to know the right people as not to know the wrong ones.”
“But how in the world,” Marie Louise burst out from the depths of a troubled spirit, “am I to tell who the right ones are? It seems so difficult. Can you tell me?” She suddenly turned to Peale. “Could you tell me, Mr. Peale?”
Now Peale, like a great many people who are aware of making social distinctions while somewhat despising them, was always irritated at hearing them talked about in public, and he answered:
“I can tell my friends, thank you, Miss Carman, and I am afraid I don’t see the necessity of introducing any other standard.”
Marie Louise fell back, feeling, she did not know why, dreadfully snubbed, but she was immediately relieved to hear Mrs. Emmons laugh rather mockingly, and take up the responsibility of answering.
“Isn't that just like Prixley? Of course he doesn’t feel the necessity of other standards, because we have saved him the trouble. We have cultivated such a taste for the best, that we are the only people he can feel friendship for.”
“I rather doubt that,” said Peale.
“I wish I could,” put in Jerry. “I often think I should like a return to nature—white muslin and a big waist—but after a short experience of you, Mrs. Bill, it isn’t possible.”
“The truth of it is,” Mrs. Emmons went on, “Prixley is more of a snob than any of us. He won’t go to people’s houses just because they give nice parties. He wants to know who they are. That is what he is always asking, isn’t he, Serena? Who are they? As if it mattered who they are when what they are is all right.”
“I own,” said Peale, “that perhaps it was narrow to ask how people’s grandfathers made their money, but now we seem to think it is provincial to ask how they are making it themselves. And I saw you the other evening, Mrs. Emmons, sitting between a man who is under indictment for bribery and”
“Now, please, Prixley,” interrupted Miss Bowles, “don't begin to talk like that. I don’t think anything is more second-rate than to introduce moral ideas into social relations. I have some cousins in Yonkers who are always asking me about ‘the immorality of society.’ They intimate it is the reason why they don’t mingle with it. (I need not tell you the real reason, poor old ladies.) I judge people just the way I find them. I judge them the way they used to judge the witches. If they swim they are all right, if they sink they're not—or perhaps it was just the other way. Anyhow, I am always willing to give a helping hand as long as they can keep their heads above water, and if my virtue needs a victim, I expend it in pushing down those who have already gone under. I call that charity and common sense.”
“Then I must be afloat,” cried Marie Louise, “for you are certainly giving me a helping hand.”
“Oh, you're all right,” said Miss Bowles. “The great thing in New York is to have something to bring oh, not only material things, though they are well enough, but beauty and brains, like your mother, Jerry; or nice, smart looks, like yours, May.”
“No brains for you, Mrs. Bill,” Jerry observed.
“Well, May does not pretend to be clever, do you, May?” Miss Bowles went on, quite unabashed. “Neither do I, and yet Has it ever occurred to you to why it is I am asked everywhere—unmarried, over forty, and not well off?”
“I always supposed my well-known passion for you had something to do with it, dear Miss Serena,” said Jerry. Miss Bowles paid not the least attention to him, but went on:
“The reason is that I have something definite to bring. That is my idea of our duty to society. I never was handsome, and,as I said, I’m not clever, but I have something to contribute. I know about people. I make it my business. I come out as regularly as the daily papers, and no one can sue me for libel. I’m right. Some people gossip. I tell the truth.”
“How infinitely wickeder,” Orvice murmured.
Marie Louise hung on every word, with an attention very different to that which she had paid so conscientiously to the speakers at the board meeting. She felt at last that her feet were set upon the right track. She, usually so talkative, hardly spoke, but sat silent with her eyes usually fixed upon Orvice.
Toward three she took her departure, following the example of the Emmonses.
Miss Bowles detained Jerry.
“Isn't she pretty? Won’t she be a success?” she asked.
“One doesn’t want to be like Prixley, of course, but one does want to ask who she is?”
Miss Bowles nodded triumphantly.
“You see,” she said, “you have to come to me for information. Well, there is a story that her mother was a car-cleaner on the New York Central, and found the favorite tooth-brush All a lie, my dear. They were decent people in a small, up-State town, and her father struck gold, or something, and left her Now, Jerry, you have first start. Do make the best of it before she is snapped up by some fortune-hunter.”
“Some day when she is a duchess,” said Jerry, “we shall laugh over the remembrance that you once offered her to me.”
“But you do think her charming?”
“Charming? Not a bit. Rather appealing.”
“Why shouldn’t you marry her as well as any one else?”
“Well, I think of a good many reasons. In the first place, I have nothing to attract a girl like that. She wants a title; or will by the time you people have finished with her. Besides, I am going up the Amazon this winter with a couple of English fellows who own a rubber forest, and when I come back in eighteen months, Miss Carman will probably no longer be an American citizen,”
“How irritating you are, Jerry! You might think of your mother.”
“You think Miss Carman would be her selection for me?”
“I think she would be glad to see you settled.”
“I see—at the only profession I’m capable of. Good-by, Miss Serena.”
But Miss Serena could not help hoping she had made more impression on him than he would admit. If only she could give Marie Louise what she termed a “hint” also. Then she remembered the Amazon with annoyance.