Pauline had not been long in her native city again before she made the discovery that a great deal was now socially expected of her. The news of her return spread abroad with a rapidity more suggestive of bad than of good tidings; her old acquaintances, male and female, flocked to the Bond Street house with a most loyal promptitude. The ladies came in glossycoupésand dignified coaches, not seldom looking about them withdilletantesurprise at the mercantile glare and tarnish of this once neat and seemly crossway, as they mounted Mrs. Varick's antiquated stoop. Most of them were now married; they had made their market, as Pauline's deceased mother would have said, and it is written of them with no wanton harshness that they had in very few cases permitted sentiment to enact the part of salesman. There is something about the fineness of our republican ideals (however practice may have determinedly lowered and soiled them) that makes the mere worldly view of marriage a special provocation to the moralist. Regarded as a convenient mutual barter in Europe, there it somehow shocks far less; the wrong of the grizzled bridegroom winning the young, loveless, but acquiescent bride bears a historic stamp; we recall, perhaps, that they have always believed in that kind of savagery over there; it is as old as their weird turrets and their grim torture-chambers. But with ourselves, who broke loose, in theory at least, from a good many tough bigotries, the sacredness of the marriage state presents a much more meagre excuse for violation. It was not that the husbands of Pauline's wedded friends were in any remembered instance grizzled, however; they were indeed, with few exceptions, by many years the juniors of her own dead veteran spouse; but the influences attendant upon their unions with this or that maiden had first concerned the question of money as a primary and sovereign force, and next that of name, prestige, or prospective elevation. These young brides had for the most part sworn a much more sincere fidelity to the carriages in which they now rode, and the pretty or imposing houses in which they dwelt, than to the important, though not indispensable, human attachments of such prized commodities.
Pauline found them all strongly monotonous; she could ill realize that their educated simpers and their regimental sort of commonplace had ever been potent to interest her. One had to pay out such a small bit of line in order to sound them; one's plummet so soon struck bottom, as it were. She found herself silently marvelling at the serenity of their contentment; no matter how gilded were the cages in which they made their decorous little trills, what elegance of filigree could atone for the absence of space and the paucity of perches?
The men whom she had once known and now re-met pleased her better. They had, in this respect, the advantage of their sex. Even when she condemned them most heartily as shallow and fatuous, their detected admiration of her beauty or of their pleasure in her company won for them the grace of a pardoning afterthought. They were still bachelors, and some of them more maturely handsome bachelors than when she had last looked upon them. They had niceties and felicities of attitude, of intonation, of tailoring, of boot or glove, to which, without confessing it, she was still in a degree susceptible.
But she did not encourage them. They were not of her new world; she had got quite beyond them. She flattered herself that she always affected them as being gazed down upon from rather chilly heights. She insisted on telling herself that they were much more difficult to talk with than she really found them. This was one of the necessities of her conversion; they must not prove agreeable any longer; it was inconsequent, untenable, that they should receive from her anything but a merely hypocritic courtesy. She wanted her contempt for the class of which they were members to be in every way logical, and so manufactured premises to suit its desired integrity. Meanwhile she was much more entertaining than she knew, and treated Courtlandt, one day, with quite a shocked sternness for having informed her that these male visitors had passed upon her some very admiring criticisms.
"I have done my best to behave civilly," she declared. "I was in my own house, you know, when they called. But I cannot understand how they can possiblylikeme as they no doubt used to do! I would much rather have you bring me quite a contrary opinion, in fact."
"If you say so," returned Courtlandt, with his inimitable repose, "I will assure them of their mistake and request that they correct it."
Pauline employed no self-deception whatever in the acknowledgment of her real feelings toward Courtlandt. She cherished for him what she liked to tell herself was an inimical friendliness. In the old days he had never asked her to marry him, and yet it had been plain to her that under favoring conditions he might have made her this proposal. She was nearly certain that he no longer regarded her with a trace of the former tenderness. On her own side she liked him so heartily, notwithstanding frequent antagonisms, that the purely amicable nature of this fondness blurred any conception of him in the potential light of a lover.
But, indeed, Pauline had resolutely closed her eyes against the possibility of ever again receiving amorous declaration or devotion. She had had quite enough of marriage. Her days of sentiment were past. True, they had never actually been, but the phantasmal equivalent for them had been, and she now determined upon not replacing this by a more accentuated experience. Her path toward middle life was very clearly mapped out in her imagination; it was to be strewn with nicely sifted gravel and bordered by formally clipped foliage. And it was to be very straight, very direct; there should be no bend in it that came upon a grove with sculptured Cupid and rustic lounge. The "marble muses, looking peace" might gleam now and then through its enskirting boskage, but that should be all. Pauline had read and studied with a good deal of fidelity, both during her marriage and after her widowhood. She had gone into the acquisition of knowledge and the development of thought as some women go into the intoxication of a nervine. Her methods had been amateurish and desultory; she had not been taught, she had learned, and hence learned ill. "The modern thinkers," as she called them, delighted her with their liberality, their iconoclasm. She was in just that receptive mood to be made an extremist by their doctrines, the best of which so sensibly warn us against extremes. Her husband's memory, for the sake of decency if for no other reason, deserved the reticence which she had shown concerning it. He had revealed to her a hollow nature whose void was choked with vice, like some of those declivities in neglected fields, where the weed and the brier run riot. The pathos of her position, in a foreign land, with a lord whose daily routine of misconduct left her solitary for hours, while inviting her, had she so chosen, to imitate a course of almost parallel license, was finally a cogent incentive toward that change which ensued. The whole falsity of the educational system which had resulted in her detested marriage was slowly laid bare to her eyes by this shocking and salient example of it.
There was something piteous, and yet humorous as well, in her present intellectual state. She was a young leader in the cause of culture, without a following. She believed firmly in herself, and yet deceived herself. Much in the world that it was now her fixed principle to shun and reprobate, she liked and clung to. These points of attraction were mostly superficialities, it is true, like the fashion of clothes or the conventionalism of accepted social customs. But even these she had more than half persuaded herself that she despised, and when she observed them in others they too often blinded her to attractions of a less flimsy sort. She had verged upon a sanguine and florid fanaticism, and was wholly unconscious of her peril. Some of Courtlandt's sober comments might effectually have warned her, if it had not been for a marked contrary influence. This was represented by the gentleman whom we have already heard her name as Mr. Kindelon.
She had been presented to him on the steamer during her recent homeward voyage, by an acquaintance who knew little enough regarding his antecedents. But Ralph Kindelon had been at once very frank with her. This was the most prominent trait that usually disclosed itself in him on a first acquaintance; he always managed to impress you by his frankness. He had a large head set on a large frame of splendid, virile proportions. His muscular limbs were moulded superbly; his big hands and feet had the same harmony of contour, despite their size; his grace of movement was extraordinary, considering his height and weight; the noble girth and solidity of chest struck you as you stood close to him—men found it so substantially, women so protectively, human. A kind of warmth seemed to diffuse itself from his bodily nearness, as if the pulse of his blood must be on some exceptionally liberal scale. But for those whom he really fascinated his real fascinations lay elsewhere. You met them in the pair of facile dimples that gave genial emphasis to his sunny smile; in the crisp, coarse curl of his blue-black hair, which receded at either temple, and drooped centrally over a broad, full brow; in the sensuous, ample, ruddy mouth, which so often showed teeth of perfect shape and unflawed purity, and was shaded by a mustache tending to chestnut in shade, with each strong crinkled hair of it rippling away to the smooth-sloping cheeks; and lastly in the violet-tinted Irish eyes, whose deep-black lashes had a beautiful length and gloss.
Kindelon spoke with a decided brogue. It was no mere Celtic accent; it was the pure and original parlance of his native island, though shorn of those ungrammatical horrors with which we are prone by habit to associate it. His English was Irish, as one of his own countrymen might have said, but it was very choice and true English, nevertheless. Well as he spoke it, he spoke it immoderately, even exorbitantly, when the mood was upon him, and the mood was upon him, in a loquacious sense, with considerable pertinacity. He was the sort of man concerning whom you might have said, after hearing him talk three minutes or so, that he talked too much; but if you had listened to him five minutes longer, your modified opinion would probably have been that he scarcely talked too much for so good a talker.
It has been chronicled of him that he was extremely frank. Before he had enlivened during more than an hour, for Pauline, the awful tedium of an Atlantic voyage in winter, she discovered herself to be in a measure posted concerning his personal biography. His parents had been farmers in his native Ireland, and he was the fourth of a family of eleven children. At the age of twelve years a certain benevolent baronet, whose tenant his father was, had sent him to school in Dublin with a view toward training and encouraging a natural and already renowned precocity. At school he had done well until seventeen, and at seventeen he had suddenly found himself thrown on the world, through the death of his patron. After that he had revisited his somewhat distant home for a brief term, and soon afterward had taken passage for America, aided by the funds of an admiring kinsman. He had even then developed evidence of what we call a knack for writing. After severe hardships on these shores, he had drifted into an editorial office in the capacity of printer. This had been a godsend to him, and it had fallen from the skies of Chicago, not New York. But New York had ultimately proved the theatre of those triumphs which were brilliant indeed compared with the humdrum humility of his more Western pursuits. Here he had written articles on many different subjects for the local journals; he had served in almost every drudging department of reportorial work; he had risen, fallen, risen, and at last risen once and for all, durably and honorably, as an associate-editor in a popular and prominent New York journal. He told Pauline the name of his journal—the New York "Asteroid"—and she remembered having heard of it. He laughed his affluent, mellow laugh at this statement, as though it were the most amusing thing in the world to find an American who had only "heard of" the New York "Asteroid."
In a political sense, and moreover in all senses, he was a zealous liberal. How he had managed to scrape together so remarkable an amount of knowledge was a mystery to himself. Everything that he knew had been literally "scraped together;" the phrase could not be apter than when applied to his mental store of facts. He read with an almost phenomenal swiftness, and his exquisite memory retained whatever touched it with a perfection like that of some marvellously sensitive photographic agent. He never forgot a face, a book, a conversation. He hardly forgot a single one of his newspaper articles, and their name was legion. His powers just stopped short of genius, but they distinctly stopped there. He did many things well—many things, in truth, which for a man so hazardously educated it was surprising that he did at all. But he did nothing superlatively well. It was the old story of that fatal facility possessed by numbers of his own countrymen who have migrated to these shores. Perhaps the one quality that he lacked was a reflective patience—and this is declared of his brains alone, having no reference to his moral parts. He leaped upon subjects, and devoured them, so to speak. It never occurred to him that there is a cerebral digestion, which, if we neglect its demands, inevitably entails upon us a sort of dyspeptic vengeance. In crushing the fruit with too greedy a speed we get to have a blunted taste for its finer flavor.
Within certain very decided limits he had thus far made an easy conquest of Pauline. She had never before met any one whom he remotely resembled. In the old days she would have shrank from him as being unpatrician; now, his fleet speech, his entire lack of repose, his careless, unmodish, though scrupulously clean dress, all had for her an appealing and individual charm. After parting on the arrival in New York, she and Kindelon had soon re-met. He bore the change from oceanic surroundings admirably in Pauline's eyes. With characteristic candor he told her that he had come back from the recent visit to his old parents in Ireland (Pauline knowing all about this visit, of course) to find himself wofully poor. She was wondering whether he would resent the offer of a loan if she made him one, when he suddenly surprised her by a statement with regard to "present funds," that certainly bore no suggestion of poverty. The truth was, he lacked all proper appreciation of the value of money. Economy was an unknown virtue with him; to have was to spend; he was incapable of saving; no financial to-morrow existed for him, and by his careless and often profuse charities he showed the same absence of caution as that which marked all other daily expenditures.
In her immediate purchase of a new residence she consulted with him, and allowed herself to be guided by his counsels. This event brought them more closely together for many days than they would otherwise have been. His artistic feeling and his excellent taste were soon a fresh surprise to her. "I begin to think," she said to him one day, "that there is nothing you do not know."
He laughed his blithe, bass laugh. "Oh," he said, "I know a lot of things in a loose, haphazard way. We newspaper men can't escape general information, Mrs. Varick. We breathe it in, naturally, and in spite of ourselves."
"But tell me," Pauline now asked, "are these other people to whom I shall soon be presented as clever as you are?"
He looked at her with merriment twinkling in his light-tinted eyes. "They're a good deal cleverer—some of them," he replied. "They could give me points and beat me, as we say in billiards."
"You make me very anxious to know them."
"When you talk like that I feel as if I might be tempted to postpone all introductions indefinitely," he responded. He spoke with sudden seriousness, and she felt that mere gallantry had not lain at the root of this answer.
As a matter of course, Kindelon and Courtlandt soon met each other in Pauline's drawing-room. Courtlandt was quite as quiet as usual, and the Irishman perhaps rather unwontedly voluble. Pauline thought she had never heard her new friend talk better. He made his departure before her cousin, and when he had gone Pauline said, with candid enthusiasm:
"Isn't he a wonderful man?"
"Wonderful?" repeated Courtlandt, a trifle drowsily.
She gave him a keen look, and bristled visibly while she did so. "Certainly!" she declared. "No other word just expresses him. I didn't observe you very closely, Court," she went on, "but I took it for granted that you were being highly interested. I can't imagine yournotbeing."
"He gave me a kind of singing in the ears," said Courtlandt. "I've got it yet. He makes me think of one of those factories where there's a violent hubbub all the time, so that you have to speak loud if you want to be heard."
Pauline was up in arms, then. "I never listened to a more scandalously unjust criticism!" she exclaimed. "Do you mean to tell me, unblushingly, that you do not think him averyextraordinary person?"
"Oh, very," said her cousin.
Pauline gave an exasperated sigh. "I am so used to you," she said, "that I should never even be surprised by you. But you need not pretend that you can have any except onetruthfulopinion about Mr. Kindelon."
"I haven't," was the reply. "He's what they call a smart newspaper man. A Bohemian chap, you know. They're nearly all of them just like that. They can talk you deaf, dumb, and blind, if you only give them a chance."
"I don't think the dumbness required any great effort, as far asyouwere concerned!" declared Pauline, with sarcastic belligerence.
She never really quarrelled with Courtlandt, because his impregnable stolidity made such a result next to impossible. But she was now so annoyed by her cousin's slighting comments upon Kindelon that her treatment was touched with a decided coolness for days afterward.
Meanwhile her aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie, had undergone considerable discomforting surprise. Mrs. Poughkeepsie had been prepared to find Pauline changed, but by no means changed in her present way. On hearing her niece express certain very downright opinions with regard to the life which she was bent upon hereafter living, this lady at first revealed amazement and afterward positive alarm.
"But my dear Pauline," she said, "you cannot possibly mean that you intend to get yourself talked about?"
"Talked about, Aunt Cynthia? I don't quite catch your drift, really."
"Let me be plainer, then. If you remain out of society, that is one thing. I scarcely went anywhere, as you know, for ten years after my husband's death—not, indeed, until Sallie had grown up and was ready to come out. There is no objection, surely, against closing one's doors upon the world, provided one desires to do so—although I should say that such a step, Pauline, at your age, and after two full years of widowhood, was decidedly a mistake. Still"—
"Pardon me, Aunt Cynthia," Pauline here broke in. "Nothing is further from my wish than to close my doors upon the world. On the contrary, I want to open them very wide indeed."
Mrs. Poughkeepsie lifted in shocked manner both her fair, plump, dimpled hands. She was a stout lady, with that imposing, dowager-like effect ofembonpointwhich accompanies a naturally tall and majestic stature. Her type had never in girlhood been a very feminine one, and it now bordered upon masculinity. Her eyes were hard, calm and dark; her arching nose expressed the most serene self-reliance. She was indeed a person with no doubts; she had, in her way, settled the universe. All her creeds were crystallized, and each, metaphorically, was kept in cotton, as though it were a sort of family diamond. She had been a Miss Schenectady, of the elder, wealthy and more conspicuous branch; it was a most notable thing to have been such a Miss Schenectady. She had married a millionaire, and also a Poughkeepsie; this, moreover, was something very important and fine. She had so distinct a "position" that her remaining out of active participation in social pursuits made no difference whatever as regarded her right to appear and rule whenever she so chose; it had only been necessary for her to lift her spear, when Miss Sallie required her chaperonage, and the Snowes and Briggses had perforce to tremble. And this fact, too, she held as a precious, delectable prerogative.
In not a few other respects she was satisfied regarding herself. There was nothing, for that matter, which concerned herself in any real way, about which she did not feel wholly satisfied. Her environment in her own opinion was of the best, and doubtless in the opinion of a good many of her adherents also. From the necklace of ancestral brilliants which she now wore, sparkling at ball or dinner, on her generous and creamy neck, to the comfortably-cushioned pew in Grace Church, where two good generations of Poughkeepsies had devoutly sat through many years of Sundays, she silently valued and eulogized the gifts which fate had bestowed upon her.
Pauline's present attitude seemed to her something monstrous. It had not seemed monstrous that her niece should give the bloom and vital purity of a sweet maidenhood to a man weighted with years and almost decrepid from past excesses. But that she should seek any other circle of acquaintance except one sanctioned by the immitigable laws of caste, struck her as a bewildering misdemeanor.
"My dear Pauline," she now exclaimed, "you fill me with a positive fear! Of course, if you shut your doors to the right people you open them to the wrong ones. You have got some strange idea abroad, which you are now determined to carry out—toexploiter, my dear! With your very large income there is hardly any dreadful imprudence which you may not commit. There is no use in telling me that the people whom one knows are not worth knowing. If you have got into that curious vein of thought you have no remedy for it except to refrain from all entertaining and all acceptance of courtesies. But I beg, Pauline, that you will hesitate before you store up for yourself the material of ugly future repentance. Sallie and I have accepted the Effinghams' box at the opera to-night. Those poor Effinghams have been stricken by the death of their father; it was so sudden—he was sitting in his library and literally fell dead—he must certainly have left two millions, but of course that has nothing to do with their bereavement, and it was so kind of them to remember us. They know that I have always wanted a proscenium, and that there are no prosceniums, now, to be had for love or money. I have sent our box in the horse-shoe to cousin Kate Ten Eyck; she is so wretchedly cramped in her purse, you know, and still has Lulu on her hands, and will be so grateful—as indeed she wrote me quite gushingly that shewas, this very afternoon. Now, Pauline, won't you go with us, my dear?"
Pauline went. A notedprima donnasang, lured by an immense nightly reward to disclose her vocal splendors before American audiences. But her encompassment, as is so apt to be the case here, was pitiably mediocre. She sang with a presentable contralto, a passable baritone, an effete basso, and an almost despicable tenor. The chorus was anachronistic in costume, sorry in voice, and mournfully undrilled. But thedivawas so comprehensively talented that she carried the whole performance. At the same time there were those among her hearers who lamented that her transcendent ability should be burlesqued by so shabby and impotent a surrounding. The engagement of this famous lady was meanwhile one of those sad operatic facts for which the American people have found, during years past, no remedy and no preventive. The fault, of course, lies with themselves. When they are sufficiently numerous as true lovers of music they will refuse their countenance to even a great singer except with creditable artistic and scenic support.
Pauline sat in the Effinghams' spacious proscenium-box, between Mrs. Poughkeepsie and her daughter. Sallie Poughkeepsie was a large girl, with her mother's nose, her mother's serenity, her mother's promise of corpulent matronhood. She had immense prospects; it was reported that she had refused at least twenty eligible matrimonial offers while waiting for the parental nod of approval, which had not yet come.
During the firstentr'actea little throng of admirers entered the box. Some of these Pauline knew; others had appeared, as it were, after her time. One was an Englishman, and she presently became presented to him as the Earl of Glenartney. The title struck her as beautiful, appealing to her sense of the romantic and picturesque; but she wondered that it had done so when she subsequently bent a closer gaze upon the receding forehead, flaccid mouth and lank frame of the Earl himself. He had certainly as much hard prose about his appearance as poetry in his name. Mrs. Poughkeepsie beamed upon him in a sort of sidelong way all the time that he conversed with Sallie. A magnate of bountiful shirt-bosom and haughty profile claimed her full heed, but she failed to bestow it entirely; the presence of this unmarried Scotch peer at her child's elbow was too stirring an incident; her usual equanimity was in a delightful flutter; ambition had already begun its insidious whispers, for the Earl was known to be still a bachelor.
Pauline, who read her aunt so thoroughly, felt the mockery of this maternal deference. She told herself that there was something dreary and horrible about a state of human worldliness which could thus idolize mere rank and place. She knew well enough that so long as Lord Glenartney were not a complete idiot, and so long as his moral character escaped the worst depravity, he would be esteemed a magnificent match for her cousin.
The Earl remained at Sallie's side all through the succeeding act. When the curtain again fell he still remained, while other gentlemen took the places of those now departing. And among these, to her surprise and pleasure, was Ralph Kindelon.
She almost rose as she extended her hand to her friend. A defiant satisfaction had suddenly thrilled her. She pronounced Kindelon's name quite loudly as she presented him to her aunt. Instead of merely bowing to Mrs. Poughkeepsie, Kindelon, with effusive cordiality, put forth his hand. Pauline saw a startled look creep across her aunt's face. The handsome massive-framed Irishman was not clad in evening dress. He towered above all the other gentlemen; he seemed, as indeed he almost was, like a creature of another species. His advent made an instant sensation; a universal stare was levelled upon him by these sleek devotees of fashion, among whom he had the air of pushing his way with a presumptuous geniality. He carried a soft "wide-awake" hat in one hand; his clothes were of some dark gray stuff; his neatly but heavily booted feet made dull sounds upon the floor as he now moved backward in search of a chair. There was no possible doubt regarding his perfect self-possession; he had evidently come to remain and to assert himself.
"Who on earth is he?" Mrs. Poughkeepsie found a chance to swiftly whisper in the ear of her niece. There was an absolutely dramatic touch in the agitation which went with her questioning sentence.
Pauline looked steadily at her aunt as she responded: "A very valued friend of mine."
"But, my dear!" faltered Mrs. Poughkeepsie. The fragmentary little vocative conveyed a volume of patrician dismay.
By this time Kindelon had found a chair. He placed it close to Pauline.
"I am so very glad that you discovered me," said Pauline. She spoke in quite loud tones, while everybody listened. Her words had the effect of a distinct challenge, and as such she intended them.
"I am flinging down a gauntlet," she thought, "to snobbery and conservatism. This slight event marks a positive era in my life."
"I saw you from the orchestra," now said Kindelon, in his heartiest tones. "The distance revealed you to me, though I cannot say it lent the least enchantment, for that would surely be impossible." He now looked towards Mrs. Poughkeepsie, without a trace of awe in his mirthful expression. "You must pardon my gallantry, madam," he proceeded. "Your niece and I, though recent friends, are yet old ones. We have crossed the Atlantic together, and that, in the winter season, is a wondrous promoter of intimacy, as you perhaps know. Perhaps Mrs. Varick has already done me the honor of mentioning our acquaintance."
"Not until now," said Mrs. Poughkeepsie, with a smile that had the glitter of ice in it.
The orchestra had not yet recommenced, and the curtain would not reascend for at least ten good minutes. A vigorous babble of many voices rose from the many upstairs boxes. In some of these Kindelon's appearance might not have created the least comment. Here it was a veritable bombshell.
The "Poughkeepsie set" was famed for its rigid exclusiveness. Wherever Miss Sallie and her mother went, a little train of courtiers invariably followed them. They always represented an ultra-select circle inside of the larger and still decidedly aristocratic one. Only certain young men ever presumed to approach Sallie at all, and these were truly the darlings of fortune and fashion—young gentlemen of admitted ascendency, whose attentions would have made an obscure girl rapidly prominent, and who, while often distinguished for admirable manners, always contrived to hover near those who were the sovereign reverse of obscure. They would carry only her bouquets, or those of other girls who belonged to the same special and envied clique; they would "take out in the German" only Sallie and her particular intimates. Bitter jealousies among the contemplating dowagers were often a result of this determined eclecticism. "Whyisit that my Kate has to put up with so many second-rate men?" would pass with tormenting persistence through the mind of this matron. "Why can't my Caroline get any of the great swells to notice her?" would drearily haunt another. And between these two distressed ladies there might meanwhile be seated a third, whose daughter, for reasons of overwhelming wealth or particular attractiveness, always moved clad in a nimbus of sanctity.
Pauline was perfectly well aware that the coming of her friend had seemed an audacity, and that his unconventionally garrulous tongue was now regarded as a greater one. Courtlandt may have told her that the rival factions had cemented their differences and that all society in New York was more democratic than formerly. Still, it was unimaginable that her aunt Cynthia could ever really change her spots. Where she trod, there, too, must float the aroma of an individual self-glorification. Pauline was as much delighted by Kindelon's easy daring as by the almost glacial answer of her stately kinswoman; and she at once hastened to say, while looking with a smile at the unembarrassed Kindelon himself,—
"I have scarcely had a chance to tell either my aunt or my cousin how good you were to me on the 'Bothnia.'" Then she lifted her fan, and waved it prettily toward Sallie. "Thisismy cousin, Miss Poughkeepsie," she went on; she did not wait for the slow accomplishment of Sallie's forced and freezing bow, but at once added: "and here is Lord Glenartney, here Mr. Fyshkille, here Mr. Van Arsdale, here Mr. Hackensack. Now, I think you know us all, Mr. Kindelon."
As she ended her little speech she met Mrs. Poughkeepsie's eyes fixed upon her in placid consternation. Of course this wholesale introduction, among the chance occupants of an opera box, was a most unprecedented violation of usage. But that was precisely Pauline's wish—to violate usage, if she could do it without recourse to any merely vulgar rupture. They had all stared at Ralph Kindelon, had treated him as if he were some curious animal instead of a fellow-creature greatly their own superior, and they should have a chance now of discovering just how well he could hold his own in their little self-satisfied assemblage.
Kindelon bowed and smiled in every direction. He appeared unconscious that everybody did not bow and smile with just the same reciprocal warmth.
"This is the most luxurious way of enjoying the opera," he exclaimed, with an upward gesture of both hands to indicate the walls of the commodious box. "But, ah! I am afraid that it possesses its drawbacks as well! One would be tempted to talk too much here—to discountenance the performance. Now, I am an irreclaimable talker, as Mrs. Varick can testify; she has hardly done anything but listen since the beginning of our acquaintance. And yet I should like to feel that I had my tribute of silence always ready for the great musical masters. Among these I rank the Italian composers, whom it has now become fashionable to despise. Pray, Mrs. Poughkeepsie, are you—or is your daughter?—a convert to what they term the new school?"
There was no ignoring the felicitous, rhythmic voice that pronounced these hurried and yet clearly enunciated sentences, unless by means of an insolence so direct and cruel that it would transgress all bounds of civil decency. Mrs. Poughkeepsie was capable of not a little insolence at a pinch; her ramparts were spiked, and could deal no gentle hurts to those who sought anything like the scaling of them. But here the overtures made were alike too suave and too bold. She felt herself in the presence of a novel civility—one that assumed her rebuff to be impossible.
"I have always preferred the Italian music," she now said. "But then my knowledge of the German is limited."
"Oh, German music is the most dreadful baw!" here struck in Lord Glenartney. He had taken an immediate fancy to Kindelon; he liked people who were in a different sphere from himself; he usually went with jockeys and prize-fighters, whenever the demands of his great position permitted such association, in his native country. Here in America he knew only the Poughkeepsie set, which had seized upon him and kept close watch over him ever since he had landed in New York.
"No, I don't at all agree with you there," said Kindelon. "Undoubtedly German music is based upon a grand idea. I should be sorry not to believe so."
"Bless my soul!" laughed his lordship; "I don't know anything about grand ideahs. The small ones are quite as much as I can manage comfortably."
"Mr. Kindelon will be shocked by such a confession, I'm sure," said the gentleman named Fyshkille, who was strikingly slim, who gazed at people condescendingly over a pale parapet of very stiff shirt-collar, and who considered himself to have a natural turn for satire. "He appears to be a person of such grand ideas himself."
This airy bit of impudence caused Mr. Van Arsdale to twirl one end of a dim, downy mustache and perpetrate a rather ambiguous giggle. But Mr. Hackensack, who was stout, with a pair of large black eyes set in a fat, colorless, mindless face, whipped forth a silk pocket-handkerchief and gave an explosive burst of merriment within its soft folds.
"You seem to be very much amused at something," drawled Sallie, while she looked in her languid way toward her trio of admirers.
"We are," said the satirical Mr. Fyshkille, who prided himself on always keeping his countenance. His two friends, who thought him a devilish clever fellow, both produced another laugh, this time suppressed on the part of each.
Pauline felt keenly annoyed. She glanced at Kindelon, telling herself that he must surely see the pitiable ridicule of which he was being made the butt.
She had, however, quite miscalculated. The self-esteem of Kindelon as utterly failed to realize that he was an object of the slightest banter, whether overt or covert, as though he had been both near-sighted and deaf. He knew nothing of the idle autocracy with which accident had now brought him into contact. He was opposed to it on principle, but he had had no experience of its trivial methods of arrogance. He had come into the box to see Pauline, and he took it broadly for granted that he would be treated with politeness by her surrounders, and listened to (provided he assumed that office of general spokesman which he nearly always assumed wherever chance placed him) with admiring attention.
A few minutes later he had stripped his would-be foes of all sting by effectively and solidly manifesting unconsciousness that they had intended to be hostile. He talked of Wagner and his followers with a brilliant force that did not solicit heed and yet compelled it. He discoursed upon the patent absurdities of Italian opera with a nimble wit and an incisive severity. Then he justified his preference for Donizetti and Rossini with a readiness that made his past sarcasm on their modes quickly forgotten. And finally he delivered a eulogy upon the German motive and ideal in music which showed the fine liberality of a mind that recognizes the shortcomings in its own predilection, and foresees the inevitable popularity of a more advanced and complicated system.
He had silenced everybody before he finished, but with the silence of respect. He had forced even these petty triflers who dwelt on the mere skirts of all actual life, to recognize him as not simply the comer from a world which they did not care to know about, but from a world greater and higher than any which they were capable of knowing about. And finally, in the flush of this handsome little triumph, he made his exit, just as the curtain was again rising, after a few murmured words to Pauline regarding certain night-work on the New York "Asteroid," which must prevent him from seeing the remainder of the performance.
Nobody heeded the opera for at least five minutes after his departure. He had left his spell behind him. Pauline at first marked its cogency, and then observed this gradually dissolve. The flimsiness of their thinking and living returned to them again in all its paltry reality.
"Of course," murmured Mrs. Poughkeepsie to Pauline, "he is a person who writes books, of one sort or another."
"If they're novels," said Lord Glenartney, "I'd like awfully to know abaout 'em. I'm fond of readin' a good novel. It's so jolly if one's lyin' daown and carn't sleep, but feels a bit seedy, ye know."
"I fancy they must be rather long novels," said Sallie, with a drowsy scorn that suited her big, placid anatomy.
"I wish he'd not run off so; I wanted the address of his hatter," declared the envenomed Mr. Fyshkille.
"Or his tailor," amended Mr. Van Arsdale, with the auxiliary giggle.
"I guess you'd find both somewhere in the Bowery," pursued the fleshy Mr. Hackensack, who always said "I guess," for "I fancy," and had a nasal voice, and an incorrigible American soul inside his correct foreign garments.
Pauline now swept a haughty look at Mr. Fyshkille and his two allies, and said, with open displeasure,—
"I suppose you think it an unpardonable sin for any gentleman to suit his own taste in dress, and not copy that of some English model. But your uncivil comments on Mr. Kindelon before myself, his admitted friend, show me that he might easily teach you a lesson in good manners."
All three of the offenders were now forced to utter words of apology, while Lord Glenartney looked as if he thought Mrs. Varick's wrath great fun, and Sallie exchanged a look of ironical distress with her mother, that seemed to inquire: "What uncomfortable absurdity will Pauline next be guilty of?"
But Mrs. Poughkeepsie and Sallie left their kinswoman at her Bond Street residence that night with very agreeable adieus. True, Lord Glenartney occupied a seat in their carriage, but even if this had not been the case, neither mother nor daughter would have vented upon Pauline any of the disapproval she had provoked in them. She was now a power in the world, and besides being near to them in blood, even her follies merited the leniency of a Poughkeepsie.
But after Sallie and her mother had said good-night to his lordship and were alone at home together, the young lady spoke with querulous disgust of her cousin's behavior.
"She will lose caste horribly, mamma, if she goes on in this way. It's perfectly preposterous! If there is one thing on earth that is reallylow, it's for a woman to become strong-minded!"
Mrs. Poughkeepsie nodded. "You are quite right. But she's her own mistress, and there is no restraining her."
"Peopleoughtto be restrained," grumbled Sallie, loosening her opera cloak, "when they want to throw away their positions like that."
"Oh, Pauline can't throw hers away so easily," affirmed Mrs. Poughkeepsie with sapient composure. "No, not with her name and her big income. She will merely get herself laughed at, you know—encanaillerherself most ludicrously; that is all. We must let her have her head, as one says of a horse. Her father was always full of caprices; he wouldn't have died a poor man if he had not been. She merely has a caprice now. Of course she will come to terms again with society sooner or later, and repent having made such a goose of herself. That is, unless"—And here Mrs. Poughkeepsie paused, while a slight but distinct shudder ended her sentence.
Sallie gave a faint, harsh laugh. "Oh, I understand you thoroughly, mamma," she exclaimed. "You mean unless some common man like that Mr. Kindelon should induce her to marry him. How awful such a thing would be! I declare, the very thought of it is sickening! With that superb fortune, too! I shouldn't be surprised if he had proposed already! Perhaps she has only been preparing us gradually for the frightful news that she has accepted him!"
But no such frightful news reached the Poughkeepsies, as day succeeded day. Pauline went little into the fashionable throngs, which were at the height of their winter gayeties. She soon quitted her Bond Street residence for good, and secured a small basement-house on a side street near Fifth Avenue, furnishing it with that speed in the way of luxurious appointment which a plethoric purse so readily commands.
"I am quite prepared now," she said to Kindelon one morning, after having received him in her new and lovely sitting-room, where everything was unique and choice, from the charming chandelier of twisted silver to the silken Japanese screen, rich with bird and flower in gold and crimson. "Of course you understand what I mean."
He affected not to do so. "Prepared?" he repeated, with the gay gleam slipping into his eyes. "For what?"
"Mysalon, of course."
"Oh," he said. "I confess that I suspected what you meant, though I was not quite sure. I almost feared lest your resolution might have undergone a change of late."
"And pray, why?" asked Pauline, raising her brows, with a little imperious smile.
"You have not mentioned the project for surely a good fortnight," he returned. "I had wondered whether or no it had weakened with you."
"It is stronger than ever," Pauline asseverated. She folded her hands in her lap and tried to look excessively firm and resolute. She was always particularly handsome when she tried to look thus; she was just slender and feminine enough in type to make the assumption of strength, of determination, especially becoming.
"Ah, very well," replied Kindelon, with one of his richly expressive smiles. "Then I have a proposition to make you. It concerns an immediate course of action on your part. Have you ever heard of Mrs. Hagar Williamson Dares?"
Pauline burst into a laugh. "No. It sounds more like an affirmation than a name—'Mrs. Hagar Williamson Dares.' One feels like saying, 'Does she?' Don't think me irredeemably trifling, and please continue. Please tell me, I mean, what remarkable things has this remarkably-named lady done?"
"Nothing."
Pauline's face, full of a pleased anticipation, fell. "Nothing! How tiresome!"
"I mean nothing remarkable," Kindelon went on, "in the luminously intellectual sense. And yet she is a very extraordinary woman. At twenty-five she was divorced from her husband."
Pauline shook her head troubledly. "That does not sound at all promising."
"He was a dissolute wretch. The courts easily granted her a release from him. At this time she was almost penniless. The question, as she had two little children, naturally arose: 'How are we three to live?' She had been reared in a New England home; her dead father had been a man of extensive learning, and at one time the principal of a successful school. Hagar had always had 'a taste for writing,' as we call it. She began by doing criticisms for a New York journal of rather scholarly tendency, whose editor had combined pity for her almost starving condition with appreciation of her undoubted talents. But the prices that the poor struggling young mother received were necessarily very meagre. She became practical. She asked herself if there was no other way of earning money by her pen. She soon discovered a way; it did not require her to know about Diderot and Strauss and Spinoza, with all of whose writings (and with many classics more of equal fame) she was finely familiar; it simply required that she should lay aside every vestige of literary pride and writepractically. Good Heavens! what a word that word 'practical' is in literature! You must tell the people how to bake a pie, to cure a headache, to bleach a shirt, to speak the truth, to clean silverware, to make a proposal of marriage. Mrs. Dares did it in country letters, in city letters, in newspaper editorials, in anonymous fine-print columns, in the back parts of fashion and household magazines—and she does it still. For a number of years past she has superintended a periodical of the popular sort, which I dare say you have never heard of. The amount of work that she accomplishes is enormous. A strong man would stagger under it, but this frail woman (you'll think her frail when you see her) bears it with wondrous endurance. Her life has been a terrible failure, looked at from one point of view—for it is scarcely exaggeration to say that had she not been handicapped by poverty in the beginning she might have swayed and charmed her generation with great books. But from another point of view her life has been a sublime success; she has trampled all aspiration under foot, forsworn every impulse of honorable egotism, and toiled for the maintenance of a home, for the education of her two daughters. They are both grown up, now—girls who are themselves bread-winners like their mother, and bearing their yoke of labor as cheerfully, though not with the same splendid strength, as she. One is a school-teacher in a well-knownkindergartenhere, and one has become an artist of no contemptible ability. Meanwhile Mrs. Dares has not merely established a pleasant and refined household; she has caused to be diffused from it, as a social centre, the warm radiations of a sweet, wholesome hospitality. Like some of the high-born Fifth Avenue leaders of fashion, she has her 'evenings.' But they are of a totally different character. They are not 'select;' I don't claim that grace for them. And yet they are very interesting, very typical. Some shabby people meet there—shabby, I mean, in mental ways no less than in character and costume. But the prevailing element is of a higher order than they. Anyone whom Mrs. Dares believes to be an earnest worker in the field of letters will have no difficulty about gaining her favor. I think she would rather greet in her rooms some threadbare young poet who had published at his own expense a slim little volume of poems possessing distinct merit and having received the snubs of both critics and public, than welcome some rich and successful writer whose real claim upon recognition she honestly doubted. And for this reason she makes mistakes. I have no doubt she is aware of making them. When we search the highways and hedges for cases of deserving charity, we cannot but light upon at least an occasional impostor—to put the matter as optimistically as possible. And now let me tell you that if my mighty explanatory outburst has roused your desire to meet Mrs. Dares, the opportunity to do so lies well within your reach."
"How?" said Pauline. And then, as if abashed by the brusque abruptness of her own question, she added, with a little penitent nod: "Oh, yes; you mean that she has kindly consented to let you bring her here."
"Not at all," said Kindelon. "It is true that she goes about a good deal. Her position as a journalist gives her, of course, theentréeto many theatres, and as she is passionately fond of the drama, her face is seldom missed on apremièreat any reputable house—Daly's, the Union Square, the Madison Square, or Wallack's. She takes delight, too, in appearing at the entertainments of her various friends, and she always does so clad elegantly, richly, but without a shadow of ostentatious display. On these occasions her society is eagerly sought. I have sometimes wondered why; for her conversation, though invariably full of sound sense and pithy acumen, lacks the cheerful play of humor which is so widely demanded to generate anything like popularity wherever men and women are socially met. But she is very popular, and I suppose it is her striking simplicity, her gift of always being sincerely and unaffectedlyherself, which has made her so. Still, for all this gregarious impulse, if I may thus name it, I do not believe she would take the first step, where you are concerned, to establish an acquaintance."
"And for what reason?" asked Pauline. Her tones, while she put this query, were full of a hurt bewilderment. Kindelon seemed to muse for a brief space; and any such unconversational mood was rare, as we know, with his mercurial lightsomeness of manner. "She would be sensitive," he presently said, "about making an advance of this sort."
"Of this sort?" repeated Pauline, with a somewhat irritated inflection. "Of what sort?"
Her companion watched her with fixity for a moment. Then he raised his large forefinger, and slowly shook it, with admonitory comedy of gesture. "You must not tell me that you don't understand," he said. "Put yourself in this lady's place. Suppose that you, in spite of fine brains and noble character, lacked the social standing"—
Pauline broke in quite hotly at this. Her eyes had taken a quick sparkle, and the color was flying rosy and pure into her fair face. "Pshaw!" she exclaimed. "It is not any question of social standing. I want to know these people"—She suddenly paused, as though her tongue had betrayed her into some regrettable and unseemly phrase. "I want to pass," she continued more slowly, "from an aimless world into one of thought and sense. Mrs. Dares is prominent in this other world. From what you say I should judge that she is a very representative and influential spirit there. Why should she not be benign and gracious enough to seek me here? Why should she require that I shall emphatically pay her my court? Your description makes me glad and happy to know her. If she learned this, would she hold aloof from any absurd scruples about a disparity in social standing?—Well, if she did," declared Pauline, who by this time was quite excitedly flushed and fluttered, "then I should say that you had over-painted her virtues and too flatteringly concealed her faults!"
Kindelon threw back his head, as she finished, and laughed with such heartiness that more of his strong white teeth were transiently visible than would have pleased a strict judge of decorum.
"Oh, how amusing you are!" he cried. "You are really superb and don't perceive it!—Well," he proceeded, growing graver, "I suppose you would be far less so if you had the vaguest inkling of it. Now, pray listen. Does it enter your conscience at all that you are disguising a kind of royal patronage and condescension behind a gentle and saint-like humility? No—of course it doesn't. But, my dear lady, this is unequivocally true. You scoff at social standing, and yet you complacently base yourself upon it. You want to desert all your old tenets, and yet you keep a kind of surreptitious clasp about them. You would not for the world be considered a person who cared for the aristocratic purple, and yet you wrap it round you in the most illogical fashion. Mrs. Dares has her evenings; to-night is one of them. You, as yet, have no evenings; yoursalonis still in embryo. You want to affiliate with her, to be one of her set, her surroundings, hermonde. And yet you quietly bid her to your house, as though she were proposing your co-operation, your support, your intimacy, and not you hers!"
Pauline, with perhaps a deepened tinge of color in her cheeks, was staring at the floor when Kindelon ended. And from beneath her gown came the impatient little tap of a nervous foot. After an interval of silence, during which her friend's gaze watched her with a merry vivacity of expression, she slowly lifted her shapely blond head, and answered in grave, even saddened tones,—
"Then mysalonis to be a failure?—an unrealizable castle in Spain?"
"Oh, no," promptly said Kindelon, with one of those sympathetic laughs which belonged among his elusive fascinations. "By no means—unless you so will it."
"But I don't will it," said Pauline.
"Very well. Then it will be a castle in—in New York. That sounds tangible enough, surely. It is the first step that counts, and you have only to take your first step. It will certainly look much better to know some of your courtiers before you ascend your throne. And meanwhile it would be far more discreet to cultivate an acquaintance with your probable prime minister."
"All of which means—?" she said.
"That you had best let me accompany you to Mrs. Dares's house this evening."
"But I am not invited!" exclaimed Pauline.
"Oh yes, you are," said Kindelon, with easy security in the jocund contradiction. "Miss Cora, the youngest daughter of Mrs. Dares, told me last night that she and her mother would both be very glad to have you come."
There was a momentary intonation in Kindelon's voice that struck his listener as oddly unexpected. "So you have already spoken of me?" she said lingeringly, and looking at him with more intentness than she herself knew of.
"Yes," he replied, with a certain speed, and with tones that were not just set in an unembarrassed key. "I go there now and then."
"And you have mentioned me to Mrs. Dares?"
"Yes—more than once, I think. She knows that you may be induced to come this evening."
His glance, usually so direct, had managed to avoid Pauline's, which was then very direct indeed.
"Tell me," Pauline said, after another silence had somehow made itself felt between them. "Are you a very good friend of this girl—Miss Cora?"
He returned her look then, but with an unwonted vacillation of his own—or so she chose to think.
"Yes," he responded, fluently frank, as it seemed. "We are very good friends—excellent friends, I may say. You will find her quite as charming, in a different way, as her mother. I mean, of course, if you will go with me this evening—or any future evening."
Pauline put forth her hand, and laid it for an instant on his full-moulded arm.
"I will go with you this evening," she said.
Kindelon found Pauline in a very lightsome and animated state of mind when he called at her house that evening. She had a touch of positive excitement in her way of referring to the proposed visit. He thought he had never seen her look more attractive than when she received him, already wrapped in a fleecy white over-garment and drawing on her gloves, while a piquant smile played at the corners of her mouth and a vivacious glitter filled her gray eyes.
"You are here before the carriage," she said to him, "though we shan't have to wait long for that.—Hark—there is the bell, now; my men would not presume to be a minute late this evening. The footman must have detected in my manner a great seriousness when I gave him my order; I felt very serious, I can assure you, as I did so. It meant the first step in a totally new career."
"Upon my word, you look fluttered," said Kindelon, in his mellow, jocose voice.
"Naturally I do!" exclaimed Pauline, as she nodded to the servant who now announced that the carriage was in readiness. "I am going to have a fresh, genuine sensation. I am going to emancipate myself—to break my tether, as it were. I've been a prisoner for life; I don't know how the sunshine looks, or how it feels to take a gulp of good, free air."
He watched her puzzledly until the outer darkness obscured her face, and they entered the carriage together. She mystified him while she talked on, buoyant enough, yet always in the same key. He was not sure whether or no her sparkling manner had a certain sincere trepidation behind it. Now and then it seemed to him as if her voluble professions of anxiety rang false—as if she were making sport of herself, of him, or of the projected diversion.
"Do you really take the whole matter so much to heart," he presently said, while the vehicle rolled them along the wintry, lamplit streets, "or is this only some bit of dainty and graceful masquerading?"
"Masquerading?" she echoed, with a shocked accent.
"Oh, well, you are accustomed to meeting all sorts of people. You can't think that any human classes are so sharply divided that to cross a new threshold means to enter a new world."
She was silent, and he could see her face only vaguely for some little time; but when a passing light cast an evanescent gleam upon it he thought that he detected something like a look of delicate mischief there. Her next words, rather promptly spoken, bore with them an explanatory bluntness.
"I am convinced that if everybody else disappoints me Miss Dares will not."
"Miss Dares?" he almost faltered, in the tone of one thrown off his guard.
"Miss Cora Dares," Pauline continued, with a self-correcting precision. "The younger of the two daughters, the one who paints. Oh, you see," she continued, after a little laugh that was merry, though faint, "I have forgotten nothing. I've a great curiosity to see this young artist. You had not half so much to tell me about her as about her mother, and yet you have somehow contrived to make her quite as interesting."
"Why?" Kindelon asked, with a soft abruptness to which the fact of his almost invisible face lent a greater force. "Is it because you think that I like Cora Dares? I should like to think that was your reason for being interested in her."
Another brief silence on Pauline's part followed his words, and then she suddenly responded, with the most non-committal innocence of tone:
"Why, what other reason could I possibly have? Of course I suppose that you like her. And of course that is why I am anxious to meet her."
There was a repelling pleasantry in these three short sentences. If Kindelon had been inclined to slip any further into the realm of sentiment, the very reverse of encouragement had now met him. Pauline's matter-of-course complacency had a distinct chill under its superficial warmth. "Don't misunderstand me, please," she went on, with so altered a voice that her listener felt as if she had indeed been masquerading through some caprice best known to herself, and now chose once and for all to drop masque and cloak. "I really expect a most novel and entertaining experience to-night. You say that I have met all sorts of people. I have by no means done so. It strikes me that our acquaintance is not so young that I should tell you this. It is true that I made a few pleasant and even valuable friendships in Europe; but these have been exceptional in my life, and I now return to my native city to disapprove everybody whom I once approved."
"And you expect to approve all the people whom you shall meet to-night?"
"You ask that in a tone of positive alarm."
"I can't help betraying some nervous fear. Your expectations are so exorbitant."
Pauline tossed her head in the dimness. "Oh, you will find me more easily suited than you suppose."
Kindelon gave a kind of dubious laugh. "I'm not so sure that you will be easily suited," he said. "You are very pessimistic in your judgments of the fashionable throng. It strikes me that you are a rigid critic of nearly everybody. How can I tell that you will not denounce me, in an hour or so, as the worst of impostors, for having presumed to introduce you among a lot of objectionable bores?"
"I think you will admit," said Pauline, in offended reply, "that most of Mrs. Dares's friends have brains."
"Brains? Oh, yes, all sorts of brains."
"That is just what I want to meet," she rapidly exclaimed—"all sorts of brains. I am accustomed, at present, to only two or three sorts.—Oh, you need not be afraid that I shall become bored. No, indeed! On the contrary, I expect to be exhilarated. I shall fraternize with most of them—I shall be one of them almost immediately. Wait until you see!"
"I shan't see that," said Kindelon, with an amusedbrusquerie.
"What do you mean?" she questioned, once more offendedly.
He began to speak, with his old glib fleetness. "Why, my dear lady, because you arenotone of them, and never can be. You are a patrician, reared differently, and you will carry your stamp with you wherever you go. Your very voice will betray you in ten seconds. You may show them that you want to be their good friend, but you can't convince them that you and they are of the same stock. Some of them will envy you, others may secretly presume to despise you, and still others may very cordially like you. I don't think it has ever dawned upon me until lately how different you are from these persons whom you wish to make your allies and supporters. That night, when I went into your aunt's opera-box, I had a very slight understanding of the matter. I've always scoffed at the idea of a New York aristocracy. It seemed so absurd, so self-contradictory. And if it existed at all, I've always told myself, it must be the merest nonsensical sham. But now I begin to recognize it as an undeniable fact. There's a sort of irony, too, in my finding it out so late—after I have knocked about as a journalist in a city which I believed to be democratic if it was anything. However, you've made the whole matter plain to me. You didn't intend to open my plebeian eyes, but you have done so. It is really wonderful how you have set me thinking. I've often told myself that America was a political failure as a republic, but I never realized that it was a social one."
Just then the carriage stopped. "I am sorry," said Pauline, "to have unconsciously made you think ill of the literary society of New York." She paused for a moment, and there was a rebuking solemnity in her voice as she added: "I believe—I insist upon believing till I see otherwise—that it does not deserve to be condemned."
The footman was now heard, as he sprang from the box. "Good gracious!" exclaimed Kindelon; "I haven't condemned it! It condemns itself."
Pauline gave a laugh full of accusative satire. "Oh!" she burst forth. "I should like to hear you speak against it before Mrs. Dares—and your friend Miss Cora, too—as you have just done before me!"
The footman had by this time opened the carriage door. He kept one white-gloved hand on the knob, standing, with his cockaded hat and his long-skirted coat, motionless and respectful in the outer gloom.
Kindelon threw up both hands, and waved them in a burlesque of despair. "There isnoliterary society in New York," he murmured, as if the admission had been wrung from him. "Don't go inside there with any idea of meeting it, for it is not to be found! Mrs. Dares herself will tell you so!"
Pauline shook her head vigorously. "I'm sure you can't mean that," she exclaimed, in grieved reproach.
Kindelon gave one of his laughs, and jumped out of the carriage. Pauline took the hand which he offered her, while the displaced footman decorously receded.
"I do mean it," he said, as they went up a high, narrow stoop together, and saw two slim, lit windows loom before them.
"I hope I am not responsible for this last change of faith in you," she answered, while Kindelon was ringing the bell.
"Well," he at once said, "I believe you are. There is no kind of real society here except one. Mind you, I don't say this in any but the most dispassionate and critical way. And I'm not glad to say it, either; I'm sorry, in fact. But it is true"—And then, after a second of silence, he repeated—"no kind of society except one."
Pauline smiled as she watched him, but there was both exasperation and challenge in the smile.
"What kind is that?" she queried.
"Ask your aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie," he replied.
Pauline gave an irritated sigh. As she did so the door of Mrs. Dares's house was opened by a spruce-looking young negress, and they both passed into the little limited hall beyond. Tapestries of tasteful design were looped back from the small doors which gave upon the hall. Their blended stuffs of different colors produced a novel effect, wholly disproportioned to the real worth of the fabrics themselves. The deft skill of Mrs. Dares's younger daughter was responsible, not alone for these, but for other equally happy embellishments throughout this delightful miniature dwelling. In every chamber there was to be found some pretty decorative stratagem whereby a maximum of graceful and even brilliant ornamentation had been won from a minimum of pecuniary expense. Pauline's eye had swept too many costly objects of upholstery not to recognize that a slender purse had here gone with a keen artistic sense. The true instinct of beauty seemed never to err, and its constant accompaniment of simplicity in the way of actual material lent it a new charm. Screen, rug, panelling, mantel-cover, tidy, and chair-cushion took for her a quick value because of their being wrought through no luxurious means. It was so easy to buy all these things in velvet, in silk, in choice woods; it was so hard, so rare, to be able to plan them all from less pretentious resources. Before she had been five minutes in Mrs. Dares's abode, Pauline found herself affected by the mingled attractiveness and modesty of its details, as we are allured by the tints, contours, and even perfumes of certain wildflowers which glow only the more sweetly because of their contrast with cultured blooms.
Mrs. Dares herself had a look not unlike that of some timid little wildflower. She was short of stature and very fragile; Kindelon's past accounts of her incessant accomplishments took the hue of fable as Pauline gazed upon her. She was extremely pale, with large, warm, dark eyes set in a face of cameo-like delicacy. Her dress hung in folds about her slight person, as if there had been some pitying motive in the looseness of its fit. But she wore it with an air of her own. It was a timid air, and yet it was one of ease and repose. The intelligence and earnestness of her clear-cut face gave her an undeniable dignity; you soon became sure that she was wholly unassuming, but you as soon realized that this trait of diffidence had no weakness in mind or character for its cause. It seemed, in truth, to correspond with her bodily frailty, and to make her individualism more complete while none the less emphatic. The personality that pushes itself upon our heed does not always make us notice it the quickest. Mrs. Dares never pushed herself upon anybody's heed, yet she was seldom unnoticed. Her voice rarely passed beyond a musical semitone, and yet you rarely failed to catch each word it uttered. Pauline not only caught each word, as her new hostess now stood and addressed her, leaving for the time all other guests who were crowding the rather meagre apartments, but she tacitly decided, as well, that there was an elegance and purity in the expressions used by this notable little lady which some of the grander-mannered dames whom she had intimately known might have copied with profit. One peculiarity about Mrs. Dares, however, was not slow to strike her: the pale, delicate face never smiled. Not that it was melancholy or even uncheerful, but simply serious. Mrs. Dares had no sense of humor. She could sometimes say a witty thing that bit hard and sharp, but she was without any power to wear that lazier mental fatigue-dress from which some of the most vigorous minds have been unable, before hers, to win the least relaxation. This was probably the true reason why her small drawing-room often contained guests whose eccentricity of garb or deportment would otherwise have excluded them from her civilities. She could not enjoy the foibles of her fellow-creatures; she was too perpetually busy in taking a grave view of their sterner and more rational traits. She found something in nearly everybody that interested her, and it always interested her because it was human, solemn, important—a part, so to speak, of the great struggle, the great development, the great problem. This may, after all, be no real explanation of why she never smiled; for a smile, as we know, can hold the sadness of tears in its gleam, just as a drop of morning dew will hold the moisture of the autumn rainfall. But the absence of all mirthful trace on her gentle lips accorded, nevertheless, with the inherent sobriety of her nature, and they who got to know her well would unconsciously assign for both a common origin.
"My dear Mrs. Varick," she said to Pauline, "I am very glad that you chose to seek my poor hospitality this evening. Mr. Kindelon has already prophesied that we shall be good friends, and as I look at you I find myself beginning to form a most presumptuous certainty that he will not prove a false prophet. He tells me that you are weary of the fashionable world; I have seen nothing of that, myself, though I fancy I know what it is like.—A great Castle of Indolence, I mean, where there are many beautiful chambers, but where the carpets yield too luxuriously under foot, and the couches have too inviting a breadth. Now, in this little drawing-room of mine you will meet few people who have not some daily task to perform—however ill many of us may accomplish it. In that way the change will have an accent for you—the air will be fresher and more tonic, though shifting from warm to chilly in the most irregular manner. I want to warn you, my dear lady, that you will miss that evenness of temperature which makes such easy breathing elsewhere. Be prepared for a decided atmospheric shock, now and then: but you will find it rather stimulating when it arrives, and by no means unwholesome."
Pauline could scarcely repress her astonishment at this very original speech of welcome. She and Mrs. Dares were separated from all other occupants of the room while it was being delivered; Kindelon had moved away after making his two friends known to each other, and doubtless with the intention of letting his hostess stand or fall on her own conversational merits, as far as concerned the first impression which Pauline should receive from her. But this impression was one in which admiration and approval played quite as strong a part as surprise. Pauline had wanted just such a spur and impetus as her faculties were now receiving; she kept silent for a few brief seconds, in silent enjoyment of the complex emotions which Mrs. Dares had wakened. Then she said, with a low laugh that had not the least suspicion of frivolity,—
"If it is a social temperature with those barometric tricks and freaks, Mrs. Dares, I promise you that I shan't catch cold in it. But I fear Mr. Kindelon has wasted too many premonitory words upon me. He should have politely allowed me to betray myself, as a specimen of harmless and humble commonplace. I am sure to do it sooner or later."
"Oh, he has told me of your aim, your purpose," said Mrs. Dares.
Pauline colored, and laid one hand on the lady's slender arm. "Then we are rivals, I suppose?" she murmured, with an arch smile.
Mrs. Dares turned and looked at her guest before answering; there was a mild, dreamy comprehensiveness in the way she seemed to survey their many shapes, letting her large, soft, dusky eyes dwell upon no special one of them. A little later she regarded Pauline again. She now shook her head negatively before replying.
"Oh, no, no," she said. "What you see here is not in any sense a representative assemblage. I have often wished that some one would establish a stricter and more definite standard than mine. We need it sadly. There are no entertainments given in New York where the mentally alert people—those who read, and think, and write—can meet with an assurance that their company has been desired for reasons of an exceptional personal valuation. The guest without the wedding-garment is always certain to be there. I fear that I have paid too little heed to the wedding-garment; my daughters—and especially my eldest daughter, Martha—are always telling me that, in various ways.—Oh, no, Mrs. Varick, we shall not be rivals. You will have the leisure to sift, to weigh, to admit or exclude, to label, to indorse, to classify—to make order, in short, out of chaos. ThisIhave never had the leisure to do." She looked at Pauline with an almost pensive gravity. Then she slowly repeated the word, "Never."