The Marches walked home, both because it was not far, and because they must spare in carriage hire at any rate. As soon as they were out of the house, she applied a point of conscience to him.
“I don’t see how you could talk to that girl so long, Basil, and make her laugh so.”
“Why, there seemed no one else to do it, till I thought of Kendricks.”
“Yes, but I kept thinking, Now he’s pleasant to her because he thinks it’s to his interest. If she had no relation to Every Other Week, he wouldn’t waste his time on her.”
“Isabel,” March complained, “I wish you wouldn’t think of me in he, him, and his; I never personalize you in my thoughts: you remain always a vague unindividualized essence, not quite without form and void, but nounless and pronounless. I call that a much more beautiful mental attitude toward the object of one’s affections. But if you must he and him and his me in your thoughts, I wish you’d have more kindly thoughts of me.”
“Do you deny that it’s true, Basil?”
“Do you believe that it’s true, Isabel?”
“No matter. But could you excuse it if it were?”
“Ah, I see you’d have been capable of it in my place, and you’re ashamed.”
“Yes,” sighed the wife, “I’m afraid that I should. But tell me that you wouldn’t, Basil!”
“I can tell you that I wasn’t. But I suppose that in a real exigency, I could truckle to the proprietary Dryfooses as well as you.”
“Oh no; you mustn’t, dear! I’m a woman, and I’m dreadfully afraid. But you must always be a man, especially with that horrid old Mr. Dryfoos. Promise me that you’ll never yield the least point to him in a matter of right and wrong!”
“Not if he’s right and I’m wrong?”
“Don’t trifle, dear! You know what I mean. Will you promise?”
“I’ll promise to submit the point to you, and let you do the yielding. As for me, I shall be adamant. Nothing I like better.”
“They’re dreadful, even that poor, good young fellow, who’s so different from all the rest; he’s awful, too, because you feel that he’s a martyr to them.”
“And I never did like martyrs a great deal,” March interposed.
“I wonder how they came to be there,” Mrs. March pursued, unmindful of his joke.
“That is exactly what seemed to be puzzling Miss Mela about us. She asked, and I explained as well as I could; and then she told me that Miss Vance had come to call on them and invited them; and first they didn’t know how they could come till they thought of making Conrad bring them. But she didn’t say why Miss Vance called on them. Mr. Dryfoos doesn’t employ her on Every Other Week. But I suppose she has her own vile little motive.”
“It can’t be their money; it can’t be!” sighed Mrs. March.
“Well, I don’t know. We all respect money.”
“Yes, but Miss Vance’s position is so secure. She needn’t pay court to those stupid, vulgar people.”
“Well, let’s console ourselves with the belief that she would, if she needed. Such people as the Dryfooses are the raw material of good society. It isn’t made up of refined or meritorious people—professors and litterateurs, ministers and musicians, and their families. All the fashionable people there tonight were like the Dryfooses a generation or two ago. I dare say the material works up faster now, and in a season or two you won’t know the Dryfooses from the other plutocrats. They will—a little better than they do now; they’ll see a difference, but nothing radical, nothing painful. People who get up in the world by service to others—through letters, or art, or science—may have their modest little misgivings as to their social value, but people that rise by money—especially if their gains are sudden—never have. And that’s the kind of people that form our nobility; there’s no use pretending that we haven’t a nobility; we might as well pretend we haven’t first-class cars in the presence of a vestibuled Pullman. Those girls had no more doubt of their right to be there than if they had been duchesses: we thought it was very nice of Miss Vance to come and ask us, but they didn’t; they weren’t afraid, or the least embarrassed; they were perfectly natural—like born aristocrats. And you may be sure that if the plutocracy that now owns the country ever sees fit to take on the outward signs of an aristocracy—titles, and arms, and ancestors—it won’t falter from any inherent question of its worth. Money prizes and honors itself, and if there is anything it hasn’t got, it believes it can buy it.”
“Well, Basil,” said his wife, “I hope you won’t get infected with Lindau’s ideas of rich people. Some of them are very good and kind.”
“Who denies that? Not even Lindau himself. It’s all right. And the great thing is that the evening’s enjoyment is over. I’ve got my society smile off, and I’m radiantly happy. Go on with your little pessimistic diatribes, Isabel; you can’t spoil my pleasure.”
“I could see,” said Mela, as she and Christine drove home together, “that she was as jealous as she could be, all the time you was talkun’ to Mr. Beaton. She pretended to be talkun’ to Conrad, but she kep’ her eye on you pretty close, I can tell you. I bet she just got us there to see how him and you would act together. And I reckon she was satisfied. He’s dead gone on you, Chris.”
Christine listened with a dreamy pleasure to the flatteries with which Mela plied her in the hope of some return in kind, and not at all because she felt spitefully toward Miss Vance, or in anywise wished her ill. “Who was that fellow with you so long?” asked Christine. “I suppose you turned yourself inside out to him, like you always do.”
Mela was transported by the cruel
