I
“Mrs. Hopp, ma’am,” announced the maid from the door.
“Mrs. Hopp?” repeated Mrs. Derwall slowly. “Very well. You may show her up here.” And when no maid was there to answer: “I wonder what Julie Hopp wants now. People are so funny. The ones you like are as scarce as auks’ eggs, while the ones who——”
But at that moment Mrs. Hopp somewhat prematurely appeared. Mrs. Derwall rose to meet her with outstretched hands:
“My dear, what grandeur! You must be out for a campaign.”
“I am, Sophie dear,” responded the caller with an effusive embrace. “And I want you to join it. Hurry up and put your hat on.”
“If that were all I had to put on! And here you have been prinking since five o’clock in the morning. What in the world are you up to now?”
“Well,” replied Mrs. Hopp, “I’m going in to town on the ten-twenty, to begin with. And then I’m going to lunch somewhere. And after that I’m going shopping——”
Mrs. Derwall began to shake her head.
“No use to come here, Julie. It’s too soon after Christmas. And I’m on my June allowance now. I sha’n’t be able to stir out of the house this year—except when Lou happens to feel a little kindly disposed.”
The melancholy tone of this declaration caused Mrs. Hopp to smile.
“Well, I’ll trust Lou!”
“If he would trust me it would be more to the point,” sighed his wife.
“But it would be most so,” pursued her caller, “if you’d only let me finish what I want to say. I’ve got a treat for you.”
“O!” exclaimed Mrs. Derwall. “A s’prise?”
“Yes. Guess what it is.”
“A matinée?”
“Something like it, only nicer. Not that everybody would think so; but people who know would. You will.” And Mrs. Hopp beamed upon her friend with an expression in which the freemasonry of the truly superior outdid the archness of her who would incite to curiosity.
As it happened, this was an implication which never had a propitious effect upon Mrs. Derwall.
“Julie, you are so mystifying,” she plaintively said. But she evinced so small a disposition to penetrate the mystery that her friend was compelled to resume her tactics.
“It’s not just one of those silly plays, with a pretty boy to play it,” she uttered solemnly. “It’s really literary, Sophie.”
“O my!” cried Mrs. Derwall with mediocre enthusiasm. “What have I done, Julie, to deserve this?”
“You don’t look as if you believed me, Sophie,” protested Mrs. Hopp. “But just wait. It’s Professor Murch’s first lecture—Professor Richard Murch, you know. He’s going to give a course on Browning and the Higher Life.”
“O, is he?” The triumph with which Mrs. Hopp delivered herself of her momentous intelligence was only equalled by the calm with which her interlocutress received it. There ensued a brief pause, during which the two ladies studied each other. Then Mrs. Derwall suddenly realised that the floor was still hers.
“It’s awfully sweet of you, Julie. But I don’t know where you get the idea that I’m liter’y. I’m not a bit, you know—or poetical, either. And as for the Higher Life—why, really, Julie, life in the suburbs is high enough for me. I think you ought to take somebody who could appreciate it better. There’s Miss Higginson, for instance.”
“Miss Higginson!” burst out Mrs. Hopp. “I don’t want Miss Higginson, Sophie. I want you. And you needn’t tell me you don’t care for such things. I know you better. You are too modest. And if you could hear that man—the things he says——!”
Mrs. Derwall sat up very straight.
“H’m, my dear! No, thank you. I might gulp down Browning, perhaps. But I can’t swallow your Perch——”
“Murch, Sophie.”
“Murch, then, on top of him. There I draw the line.”
Mrs. Hopp looked a little agitated.
“What do you mean, Sophie? Do you—do you, perhaps, know anything against him?”
“Yes, I do,” declared Mrs. Derwall.
“What?” inquired Mrs. Hopp with hesitation. “Is it anything I should know?”
“Indeed it is, my dear! But if you haven’t found it out yet you never will,” replied Mrs. Derwall with more emphasis than tact.
“What?” asked Mrs. Hopp again. “I wouldn’t want to be countenancing anything, you know.”
“Well,” put forth Mrs. Derwall oracularly, “any man who spends his time talking to women is a fool. I don’t care what he talks about.”
Mrs. Hopp stared at her friend with a dumb amazement in which there was something of expectation unfulfilled. At last, however, she found words of protest.
“But, Sophie—aren’t you a woman yourself?”
“I’m sorry to say I am,” admitted Mrs. Derwall, without hedging. “And I’m heartily ashamed of it.”
Mrs. Hopp was again lost in stupefaction. And then:
“Is it your idea, Sophie,” she inquired a little distantly, “that we—that Professor Murch’s friends make fools of themselves over him?”
“Since you ask, Julie love, I am obliged to confess that you divine my idea precisely.”
“Sophie, you’re horrid!” retorted Mrs. Hopp. “Men could go if they wanted to, but they’re too busy—and too many other things. Don’t you sometimes think, Sophie, that men are a little lacking in some things? That they are rather—coarse?” But a light in her companion’s eye warned her back to relevancy. “Besides, he’s married.”
“All the worse!” briskly commented Mrs. Derwall, whose sex enabled her to follow the train of Mrs. Hopp’s thought. “And I can be pretty sure that you’ve never seen his wife.”
“It’s perfectly true that I haven’t,” proclaimed Mrs. Hopp, unabashed. “But it’s a case of ‘unknown wives of famous men’—don’t you know? She’s probably nice enough, only the quiet sort you don’t get acquainted with easily. And perhaps”—Mrs. Hopp took on an air of high misericord—“not very congenial. You’d think that if she really cared for what her husband says she’d be more in evidence at his lectures.”
Mrs. Derwall let herself go the length of a laugh.
“As if she didn’t know them by heart! I guess she’s sorry for the day she first let herself listen to them. She probably taught Lurch——”
“Murch, Sophie.”
“Murch, then, what an agreeable sensation it was to have ladies hang on his lips; and when she got tired of listening he tried it on the rest of you. Besides, if she were there it would spoil the whole show.”
“Sophie, you’re just as nasty as you can be!” cried Mrs. Hopp. “He needs the money. I know he does. He looks so ill, too—so pale and thin. It makes your heart ache to see him. And when he reads ‘James Lee’s Wife’——”
Words failed her. As for Mrs. Derwall, she gave vent to a perceptible sniff.
“Of course he looks pale! Anybody can look pale. You can look pale. I can look pale. How can he help looking pale if he eats all the luncheons you stuff him with? And if he looked red and fat do you suppose anybody would pay him to read love poems?”
Mrs. Hopp tossed her head.
“It’s all very well for you to talk. But you haven’t seen him, and I have. Besides, you haven’t been through things. If you knew what the world really is! If you knew, Sophie Derwall!” Mrs. Hopp, who was in receipt of comfortable alimony from a good-natured button manufacturer, darted upon her friend the meaning glances of one who has drained life’s goblet to the lees. “No, some people are fated to make mistakes. And to pay for them, Sophie. I know Professor Murch is unhappy. If you could only hear how he talks about Mr. and Mrs. Browning——!”
Mrs. Derwall was able to contain herself no longer.
“Julie Hopp!” she burst out. “Never speak to me again of Mr. and Mrs. Browning! Never! never! never! I can’t stand them. They were the two most colossal bores and fakes of the nineteenth century! Posilutely!”
The other lady was at first too horrified for words. Then dignity and scorn supported her, like caryatides, on either hand. Which spectacle, it must be said in passing, restored to Mrs. Derwall her tranquillity.
“Sophie Derwall,” at length demanded the outraged Mrs. Hopp, “how dare you say such monstrous things? Do you mean to tell me—you who pretend to read so much, to care so little for ephemeral literature—do you mean to tell me that you care nothing for Browning?” To register her intonation of the sacred syllables is a feat quite beyond the resources of unfeeling print.
“Very little, Julie,” responded Mrs. Derwall pleasantly, “very little. And the fact that ten million women go into spasms over him makes me care less. I prefer Lewis Carroll.”
At that moment Providence interposed, in the person of the maid.
“A gentleman in the reception-room, ma’am. What shall I——?”
Mrs. Hopp rose with majesty.
“I won’t keep you, Sophie. I must catch my train. I am sorry you won’t come with me. You don’t know what you miss. And we may not have many more opportunities to do things together. I meant to tell you—if you had given me a chance.”
Mrs. Derwall took it with humility, yet with amiability.
“You really make me ashamed of myself, Julie,” she returned. “It was lovely of you to think of me. I’ll go with you another time—to the Palace or the Rivoli, perhaps. They are more in my line, you know. Good-bye, dearie.”