“Frankly, Lena, I do not like Mrs. Appleton or her attitude toward life. She is the kind of woman who refuses to take the simplest thing simply, the kind that thinks subscription dances and clubs and private cars and family tombs were invented chiefly to show our exclusiveness.”
“Well, what are they for?”
Dick laughed. “Most of them to get all the fun there is in things, I should say; and the tombs, to show that love holds even after death.”
“I like her, anyway,” said Lena. “I like her better than the stuck-up kind of women.” The words sound bald. Lena’s lips made them seem humorous. It was so easy to avoid disapprobation just by that little smile and whimsical twist of the mouth.
“And whom do you mean by that!”
“You know whom I mean,” Lena answered defiantly. “And I consider Mrs. Appleton a great deal more of a society woman than Mrs. Lenox. At any rate she goes a great deal more. And she does not neglect her church duties or her charities, either. She has told me things that she is doing.”
“I should say she does not neglect them,” ejaculated Dick. “She has the art so to regild them that even philanthropy and religion become mere appendages to society. Does Mrs. Lenox belong to Ram Juna’s class, Lena?”
“No. Mrs. Appleton asked her, but she wrote that though she was interested in oriental thought, she, personally, found it more satisfactory to get it by reading. Now wasn’t that snobby, Dick?”
“Is it snobbish to choose what really suits you, instead of following a craze like a sheep woman?”
But Lena shut her lips tightly. If she had not will, she had obstinacy. She could be resolute in behalf of her realities, luxury, beauty and self. From the moment when Mrs. Appleton first dawned on her horizon, she had recognized her ideal. Here was a woman who was at once showy, fashionable and virtuous. The things that Mrs. Lenox took for granted or ignored were to her matters of absorbing importance. She magnified the office of every detail of social conduct and every minutia of society’s “functions”. It was worth while to spend a week of soul-fatiguing labor in order that a tea should be just right; and her preparations were not made in silence, but with an amount of discussion and red-tape that filled every crevice of life. She had learned the art of so cramming the days with trifles that there was no room for the big things and she could conveniently forget them.