II
On Saturday evening the delivery of a gown she had picked out of Shipley’s stock to wear to the dinner made it necessary to explain why she had purchased it. It was the simplest of dinner gowns which she drew from the box and held up for her mother’s and Ethel’s inspection.
“What earthly use can you have for that, Grace?” Ethel demanded.
Grace laid it across her mother’s knees and Mrs. Durland took a fold in her fingers to appraise the material.
“It’s certainly pretty. This is one of the new shades, isn’t it, Grace? It isn’t blue exactly——”
“They call it hydrangea blue, mother. Please hurry and say I’ll look scrumptious in it!”
“I don’t think I’d have chosen just that,” remarked Ethel putting down a handkerchief she was embroidering, in flourishing script with the initials O. H., to eye the garment critically. “If I were in your place and could afford to spend what that must have cost I think I’d have got something in one of the more definite shades. You can’t really say whether that’s blue or pink.”
“That’s the artistic part of it, old dear,” replied Grace amiably. “It’s out of the new spring stock and considered very smart. Wake up, daddy! Tell me you don’t think I’m stung!”
“I guess my views about dresses wouldn’t help you much, Grace,” Durland remarked, glancing at the gown absently and returning to his interminable calculations.
“You’ll look sweet in it, Grace,” Mrs. Durland volunteered. “You think it isn’t cut too low?”
“It’s the very latest model, mother. I don’t believe you’ll think it too low when you see me in it. I tried it on at my lunch hour yesterday and a customer got her eye on it and did her best to coax me to let her have it. But I sold her another gown that cost twenty dollars more, so Shipley’s didn’t lose anything.”
“You get so many clothes, Grace,” Ethel interrupted again intent upon her embroidery. “I don’t just see what you can want with a dress like that.”
“Oh, this is for a special occasion. Miss Reynolds has asked me to dinner Tuesday. She’s entertaining for Mrs. Mary Graham Trenton, who’s to lecture here that night.”
“You don’t mean it!” exclaimed Mrs. Durland. “I read in the paper that Mrs. Trenton was to speak here. I’d never have thought of connecting her with Miss Reynolds!”
“They’ve never met, I think. A friend of Miss Reynolds’s in Boston wrote and asked her to see that Mrs. Trenton was properly looked after, so she’s putting her up and pulling off a dinner in her honor. I might say that she didn’t appear to be awfully keen about it. She’s asking Dr. Ridgely and Judge Sanders and Dr. Loomis with their ladies, so theology, law and medicine will be represented. She asked me, I suppose, because I happened to mention to her once that I had read Mrs. Trenton’s ‘Clues to a New Social Order.’ And it may be in her mind that as a poor working girl I represent the proletariat.”
“She may have thought that being a friend of Mr. Trenton’s it would be pleasant for Mrs. Trenton to meet you,” said Ethel sweetly.
“Thank you, sister, you’re certainly the little mind reader,” Grace replied.
“I’m sure it’s very kind of Miss Reynolds to ask you,” remarked Mrs. Durland hastily, fearing a clash between the sisters. “There are no finer people in town than the Sanders and I have always heard splendid things about Dr. Loomis and his wife. It’s a privilege to meet people like that. I hope you realize that a woman of Miss Reynolds’s position can have her pick of the town. She’s certainly paying you a great compliment, Grace.”
“I don’t understand Miss Reynolds at all,” said Ethel. “She’s the last woman in the world you’d think would take a creature like Mary Graham Trenton into her house.”
“It’s because she is Miss Reynolds that she can do as she pleases,” replied Mrs. Durland conciliatingly. “And as she was asked by a friend to show some courtesy to Mrs. Trenton, she isn’t doing any more than any one else would do in the same circumstances. As I said when Grace first spoke of meeting Mr. Trenton, his wife’s a dangerous woman. It’s in her power to do a great deal of mischief in the world. I don’t believe Miss Reynolds has any patience with Mrs. Trenton’s ideas, and it can’t do Grace any harm to meet her. You ought to be glad, Ethel, that Miss Reynolds feels that Grace would fit into a select party like that.”
“I’ll be surprised if Dr. Ridgely goes to the dinner,” replied Ethel. “That woman is fighting everything the church stands for. If I had my way she wouldn’t be allowed to speak here.”
“That’s no joke!” replied Grace good-naturedly. “But there are people, you know, who are not afraid of hearing radical ideas—a few broad-minded people who think it safer to let the cranks talk out in the open than to drive them into a cellar to touch off the gentle bomb.”
“Many people feel just that way, Ethel,” said Mrs. Durland.
Mrs. Durland’s disapproval of Mrs. Trenton and the ideas identified with that lady’s name was much softened by the fact that Grace was to be included in a formal dinner which Miss Reynolds had undoubtedly arranged with care. And while Mary Graham Trenton might entertain and preach the most shocking ideas she was nevertheless one of the best known and most discussed women in America, besides being the inheritor of wealth and social position. Miss Reynolds’s marked liking for Grace afforded Mrs. Durland a satisfaction not wholly attributable to veneration for Miss Reynolds’s money or unassailable position as a member of a pioneer Indianapolis family. Grace’s unaccountable ways and her assertions of independence often brought alarm and dismay to the mother’s heart; but Grace was indubitably lovely to look at and the fine spirit in which she had accepted and met the curtailment of her course at the university excused many things. Grace had wits and she would go far, but the traveling would have to be on broad highways of her own choosing. It was not without twinges of heartache that Mrs. Durland realized that this dark-eyed daughter was peculiarly a child of the new order; that not by prayer, threat or cajolery could she be made to walk in old paths or heed the old admonitions. But there had been Morleys who were independent and forthright and Miss Reynolds’s invitation implied a recognition of Grace as a well-bred and intelligent girl.
Mrs. Durland, busily sewing, had been giving Grace such information as she possessed about the Sanderses, who were to be of Miss Reynolds’s company. Hardly less than the sons and daughters of Virginia and Kentucky, Mrs. Durland was possessed of a vast amount of lore touching the families of her native state. Mrs. Sanders was a Shelton of the old Bartholomew County family of that name. Some Shelton had once been engaged in business with a Morley who was a second cousin of Mrs. Durland. It was a tannery she thought, though it might have been a brickyard. And Sanders’s father had been a prominent citizen somewhere on the lower Wabash and had married into the Alston family of Vanderburgh County. Grace lent a sympathetic ear to this recital of ancient Hoosier history chiefly because her mother found so great a pleasure in reciting it. It was the cruelest of ironies that her mother, with all her adoration of the State and its traditions and her constant recurrence to the past glories of the Morleys, lived a life of self-denial apart from contemporaries capable of sharing her pride and pleasure in the old times.
The talk had wandered far from Grace’s dinner engagement when Ethel, who had been quietly plying her needle, took advantage of a lull to switch it back.
“I suppose you won’t feel quite like a stranger with Mrs. Trenton,” she suggested. “Mr. Trenton has no doubt told his wife of his acquaintance with you.”
“No doubt he has,” Grace replied calmly. “In fact he told me he had written her about me.”
This was not wholly candid; Trenton had only said that he had written to his wife, pursuant to an understanding between them, that he had met a girl who greatly interested him. But Ethel’s remark occasioned Grace a moment of discomfort. In her last meeting with Trenton his wife had not been mentioned, but it was possible that by now he had made a complete confession of his unfaithfulness. Irene Kirby had frequently commented upon Trenton’s frankness; Grace chilled at the thought that he might already have told his story to Mrs. Trenton in the hope of hastening the day of his freedom.
The newspapers were devoting much space to Mrs. Trenton’s impending visit. On Saturday and Sunday her portrait adorned the society pages, accompanied by sketches of her life and activities in the feminist cause that did full justice to her distinguished ancestry and high social connections. In the Durland home Mrs. Trenton continued to be a fruitful subject of discussion. There were things which Ethel thought should be said to Mrs. Trenton. She even considered asking Dr. Ridgely to say them,—a proposition which Grace derided and Mrs. Durland did not encourage. Ethel was further inspired with the idea that a committee of the best women of the city should wait upon Mrs. Trenton and try to convince her of the dangerous character of the doctrines she was advocating.
“You’re taking it altogether too seriously,” said Grace. “I don’t suppose that woman’s ever made a single convert. About so many people have always held her ideas—about marriage and things like that. The real radicals probably look on her as a huge joke. A woman who visits at Newport and goes cruising on yachts doesn’t just put herself clear outside the social breastworks. There are other, women besides Mrs. Trenton who talk free love and birth control and things like that just for the excitement and the attention they get.”
“They should be locked up, every one of them!” Ethel declared. “I’m ashamed for our city that she can come here and be received by people you’d expect better things of, and be allowed to speak. The police should stop it!”
“Well, she can’t ruin the town with one lecture,” Grace replied good-naturedly. “The Twentieth Century Club brings all sorts of lunatics here and the members are about the most conservative people in town. You couldn’t change the minds of any of them any more than you could knock over the soldiers’ monument with a feather duster.”