"Yes. And it's Gothic Cathedrals. She's mad about them lately. That ought to be easy for you."
"I can take that trick with my eyes shut."
"But don't make her feel that you know more about it than she does. Let her talk. She loves to."
"I'll remember."
"And please get dressed. The Phillips always come too early and you're not even shaved yet."
Margaret floated away and Gregory went into his dressing-room.
This was to be the last and most important of the Allen dinners which Margaret had begun early in the winter. The guest of honor was to be James Burnham, President of the Architectural Society, with eight lesser luminaries. It would be a success because these dinners of Margaret's always were a success. Sitting beside some eminent man, whose conversation she could not follow, Margaret reached her climax. As wife and companion, she was one being, as hostess another. In the act of presiding over a dinner table, Margaret found a clarity of vision that kept her in safe paths. Men whom Gregory admired and for whose good opinion he was anxious, never refused an invitation to one of Margaret's dinners.
As he dressed Gregory smiled to think what a chasm lay between the first dinner and this. Graceful and surefooted, Margaret had scaled the social cliffs, picking with unerring instinct the right spots. The dinner to-night was to mark the apex.
And it did. Looking about the table, at the soft lights, the exquisite flowers, the well-gowned women and alert men, Gregory felt that only a sketch of the Taj Mahal would do it justice. While he talked Gothic Cathedrals he drew one mentally and sent it to Jean. The subdued abundance, restrained success, the perfect balance of personal accomplishment and concealed consciousness of it, rose in delicate spires and minarets against a background of inexhaustible possibility, Eastern in its opulence.
On Margaret's right sat James Burnham, white-haired and charming, but knowing to a hair's weight what it meant for any hostess to secure him. Yankee in the shrewd appreciation of his own value, Southern in the charm of its concealment, and Latin in his attitude to all women, the famous man bent to Margaret with undivided attention. Margaret vibrated in harmony to his note. Her eyes sparkled and she had the manner of a beautiful woman withholding an advance she perfectly understood and had full power to reciprocate. Gregory looked on amused, while he followed instructions and let Phyllis Henshaw rhapsodize among the Gothic arches. He speculated about Margaret as if she were a stranger, and wondered why men with wives like that were ever jealous of them.