_ Mrs. Peniston followed the rise and culmination of the season as
keenly as the most active sharer in its gaieties; and, as a
looker-on, she enjoyed opportunities of comparison and
generalization such as those who take part must proverbially
forego. No one could have kept a more accurate record of social
fluctuations, or have put a more unerring finger on the
distinguishing features of each season: its dulness, its
extravagance, its lack of balls or excess of divorces. She had a
special memory for the vicissitudes of the "new people" who rose
to the surface with each recurring tide, and were either
submerged beneath its rush or landed triumphantly beyond the
reach of envious breakers; and she was apt to display a
remarkable retrospective insight into their ultimate fate, so
that, when they had fulfilled their destiny, she was almost
always able to say to Grace Stepney--the recipient of her
prophecies--that she had known exactly what would happen.
This particular season Mrs. Peniston would have characterized as
that in which everybody "felt poor" except the Welly Brys and Mr.
Simon Rosedale. It had been a bad autumn in Wall Street, where
prices fell in accordance with that peculiar law which proves
railway stocks and bales of cotton to be more sensitive to the
allotment of executive power than many estimable citizens trained
to all the advantages of self-government. Even fortunes supposed
to be independent of the market either betrayed a secret
dependence on it, or suffered from a sympathetic affection:
fashion sulked in its country houses, or came to town incognito,
general entertainments were discountenanced, and informality and
short dinners became the fashion.
But society, amused for a while at playing Cinderella, soon
wearied of the hearthside role, and welcomed the Fairy Godmother
in the shape of any magician powerful enough to turn the shrunken
pumpkin back again into the golden coach. The mere fact of
growing richer at a time when most people's investments are
shrinking, is calculated to attract envious attention; and
according to Wall Street rumours, Welly Bry and Rosedale had
found the secret of performing this miracle.
Rosedale, in particular, was said to have doubled his fortune,
and there was talk of his buying the newly-finished house of one
of the victims of the crash, who, in the space of twelve short
months, had made the same number of millions, built a house in
Fifth Avenue, filled a picture-gallery with old masters,
entertained all New York in it, and been smuggled out of the
country between a trained nurse and a doctor, while his creditors
mounted guard over the old masters, and his guests explained to
each other that they had dined with him only because they wanted
to see the pictures. Mr. Rosedale meant to have a less meteoric
career. He knew he should have to go slowly, and the instincts of
his race fitted him to suffer rebuffs and put up with delays. But
he was prompt to perceive that the general dulness of the season
afforded him an unusual opportunity to shine, and he set about
with patient industry to form a background for his growing glory.
Mrs. Fisher was of immense service to him at this period. She had
set off so many newcomers on the social stage that she was like
one of those pieces of stock scenery which tell the experienced
spectator exactly what is going to take place. But Mr. Rosedale
wanted, in the long run, a more individual environment. He was
sensitive to shades of difference which Miss Bart would never
have credited him with perceiving, because he had no
corresponding variations of manner; and it was becoming more and
more clear to him that Miss Bart herself possessed precisely the
complementary qualities needed to round off his social
personality.
Such details did not fall within the range of Mrs. Peniston's
vision. Like many minds of panoramic sweep, hers was apt to
overlook the MINUTIAE of the foreground, and she was much more
likely to know where Carry Fisher had found the Welly Brys' CHEF
for them, than what was happening to her own niece. She was not,
however, without purveyors of information ready to supplement her
deficiencies. Grace Stepney's mind was like a kind of moral
fly-paper, to which the buzzing items of gossip were drawn by a
fatal attraction, and where they hung fast in the toils of an
inexorable memory. Lily would have been surprised to know how
many trivial facts concerning herself were lodged in Miss
Stepney's head. She was quite aware that she was of interest to
dingy people, but she assumed that there is only one form of
dinginess, and that admiration for brilliancy is the natural
expression of its inferior state. She knew that Gerty Farish
admired her blindly, and therefore supposed that she inspired the
same sentiments in Grace Stepney, whom she classified as a Gerty
Farish without the saving traits of youth and enthusiasm.
In reality, the two differed from each other as much as they
differed from the object of their mutual contemplation. Miss
Farish's heart was a fountain of tender illusions, Miss Stepney's
a precise register of facts as manifested in their relation to
herself. She had sensibilities which, to Lily, would have seemed
comic in a person with a freckled nose and red eyelids, who lived
in a boarding-house and admired Mrs. Peniston's drawing-room; but
poor Grace's limitations gave them a more concentrated inner
life, as poor soil starves certain plants into intenser
efflorescence. She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice:
she did not dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and
predominant, but because she thought that Lily disliked her. It
is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than
insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is
a latent form of unfriendliness. Even such scant civilities as
Lily accorded to Mr. Rosedale would have made Miss Stepney her
friend for life; but how could she foresee that such a friend was
worth cultivating? How, moreover, can a young woman who has never
been ignored measure the pang which this injury inflicts? And,
lastly, how could Lily, accustomed to choose between a
pressure of engagements, guess that she had mortally offended
Miss Stepney by causing her to be excluded from one of Mrs.
Peniston's infrequent dinner-parties?
Mrs. Peniston disliked giving dinners, but she had a high sense
of family obligation, and on the Jack Stepneys' return from their
honeymoon she felt it incumbent upon her to light the
drawing-room lamps and extract her best silver from the Safe
Deposit vaults. Mrs. Peniston's rare entertainments were preceded
by days of heart-rending vacillation as to every detail of the
feast, from the seating of the guests to the pattern of the
table-cloth, and in the course of one of these preliminary
discussions she had imprudently suggested to her cousin Grace
that, as the dinner was a family affair, she might be included in
it. For a week the prospect had lighted up Miss Stepney's
colourless existence; then she had been given to understand that
it would be more convenient to have her another day. Miss Stepney
knew exactly what had happened. Lily, to whom family reunions
were occasions of unalloyed dulness, had persuaded her aunt that
a dinner of "smart" people would be much more to the taste of the
young couple, and Mrs. Peniston, who leaned helplessly on her
niece in social matters, had been prevailed upon to pronounce
Grace's exile. After all, Grace could come any other day; why
should she mind being put off?
It was precisely because Miss Stepney could come any other
day--and because she knew her relations were in the secret of her
unoccupied evenings--that this incident loomed gigantically on
her horizon. She was aware that she had Lily to thank for it; and
dull resentment was turned to active animosity.
Mrs. Peniston, on whom she had looked in a day or two after the
dinner, laid down her crochet-work and turned abruptly from her
oblique survey of Fifth Avenue.
"Gus Trenor?--Lily and Gus Trenor?" she said, growing so suddenly
pale that her visitor was almost alarmed.
"Oh, cousin Julia . . . of course I don't mean . . ."
"I don't know what you DO mean," said Mrs. Peniston, with a
frightened quiver in her small fretful voice. "Such things were
never heard of in my day. And my own niece! I'm not sure I
understand you. Do people say he's in love with her?"
Mrs. Peniston's horror was genuine. Though she boasted an
unequalled familiarity with the secret chronicles of society, she
had the innocence of the school-girl who regards wickedness as a
part of "history," and to whom it never occurs that the scandals
she reads of in lesson-hours may be repeating themselves in the
next street. Mrs. Peniston had kept her imagination shrouded,
like the drawing-room furniture. She knew, of course, that
society was "very much changed," and that many women her mother
would have thought "peculiar" were now in a position to be
critical about their visiting-lists; she had discussed the perils
of divorce with her rector, and had felt thankful at times that
Lily was still unmarried; but the idea that any scandal could
attach to a young girl's name, above all that it could be lightly
coupled with that of a married man, was so new to her that she
was as much aghast as if she had been accused of leaving her
carpets down all summer, or of violating any of the other
cardinal laws of housekeeping. _