In politer spheres he presently discovered consolations. These consolations lasted until the lady’s husband began uncivil proceedings, from the result of which Wyvill was saved by a succession of events which converted him to a belief in miracles. The lady explained everything so satisfactorily to her husband that the proceedings were withdrawn, whereupon she eloped with another and a richer man. Such was his initiation into the horrors of matrimony and Mayfair.
It is said of those who beheld the mysteries at Eleusis that thereafter they ceased to smile. Wyvill’s experiences were quite as chastening. The pleasure in things that had pleased him waned. He tried hunting, and gave it up. It cost too much. He went forth to shoot in Canada, and returned disillusioned. Yet, in default of wealth, one must have a raison d’être. It was in the search for that raison that he encountered Trella. Her effect on him was instantaneous. Before he slept he was conscious of a new conception of beauty. When he awoke it was to the consciousness of a new conception of life. From the conjunction of these conceptions there mounted like a flame the delight of a dream of possessing the girl.
In fairyland you have but to ask and it is given. Since Perrault lived and labored, Monte Carlo is the nearest approach to that country. In its sorceries are solvents so surprising that you may land there a pauper and leave a plutocrat. You may also reverse the order of things. Where the enchanted rose is, there, too, is the disenchanting thorn.
But on the slopes which a syndicate in collaboration with nature has strewn with diaphanous days and electric lights, such thorns as grew Wyvill passed unheeding, and, in passing, promenaded straight into the domain of a beauty who, however, was not sleeping, but thoroughly wide-awake.
On the way, Wyvill gathered certain facts, which were so many flowers; the domain’s precise position, for instance, its name and the kilometers it took to get there. For even in fairyland, and perhaps particularly in fairyland, there are always mileposts in high hats and others in low neck to provide you with just such information.
In serving Prince Charming they also served the Wide-Awake Beauty. As a consequence, when, in due course, the two met again, had they been first cousins they could not have known more of each other. To Prince Charming the Wide-Awake Beauty was an American heiress, and to the Wide-Awake Beauty Prince Charming was heir to an earldom. What could be more succinct, what more satisfactory? Especially when it is remembered that it had required but one meeting, complicated by nothing more quotable than the melting measures of an aria, for the parties concerned to experience the coup de foudre.
To Trella the coup had all the charm of entire novelty. In New York she had flirted right and left. She liked men, liked admiration and a bold glance, and a squeeze of the hand she was none too shy to return. Apart from a liking for such things, they left her unaffected. After the boldest glance and the tightest squeeze her pulse registered normal. That, however, was less to her credit than to the discredit of the glancers and squeezers. Their seductions were limited to gymnastics.
In Paris and on the Riviera the liking for men continued, but men were scarce. One look at Wyvill had told her that he was of a different breed. Never before had she met anyone with less manner and more ease. Never before had she beheld a human being so perfectly sent out. Never before had a presence impressed her so suddenly and so absolutely. For the first time, her pulse ceased to be normal. For the first time she saw a man, and in that man she saw, also, and for the first time, too—or thought she did—her master. At sight of him she flushed. Why, she did not know. But it seemed to her all very new and inexpressibly delightful.
In spite of which, or, perhaps, precisely on that account, when on the Casino’s esplanade, chance brought these two people face to face again, only an exchange of platitudes resulted. Yet, in circumstances not similar, perhaps, but cognate, people do not say what they think. As a rule, they do not think at all. They occupy themselves as best they may in sparring for wind. Such sparring as then occurred was rendered more vigorous than otherwise it might have been by the presence of the girl’s mother, who stuck to her, not with any un-American view to the observance of the proprieties, but simply because she had come out with her, and objected to being stranded.
The next day matters were more propitious. Wyvill dined with the Verelsts at
