“I don’t think that she did. No; I don’t think so. You are poison to her—cold poison,” said Oldmeadow. “Don’t imagine for a moment she didn’t see that you were dancing about him with veils and cymbals. She didn’t give herself away, for she had nothing to conceal. She was candid and you weren’t. She didn’t pretend that you were under the stars with her; while you kept up appearances.”
“But what’s to become of your Barney if we don’t keep them up!” Mrs. Aldesey cried. “Is he to be allowed to see that nobody can stand her—except people he can’t stand? He’ll have to live, then, with Mrs. and Mr. Prentiss. Did you try to talk to Mrs. Prentiss? Do you know that she told me that death was ‘perfectly sublime’?”
“Perhaps it is. Perhaps she’ll find it so. They all seem to think well of death, out in California”—Oldmeadow allowed himself to relax from his admonitory severity. “Mrs. Prentiss isn’t as silly as she seems, I expect. And you exaggerate Barney’s sensitiveness. He’d get on very well with Mrs. Prentiss if you weren’t there to show him you found her a bore. He has a very simple side and we must hope it may become simpler. The only chance for Barney, I see it more and more, is that we should efface ourselves as much as possible. The people who find the Prentisses a bore, I mean. And it won’t be difficult for us to do that. She will see to it that we are effaced. Only, of course, it’s a grief. I’m so fond of him”; and as Oldmeadow stretched forth his legs and put his hands in his pockets there drifted across his mind, in a thin, sharp, knife-like stroke, the memory of Barney—tall eighteen-year-old Barney—with dear old Effie, luxuriously upturned in his arms, being softly scratched—Barney’s hand with a cat was that of an expert—and told that she was the best and most beautiful of cats.
“It’s a great shame,” said Mrs. Aldesey; “I’ve been thinking my spiteful thoughts, too, instead of sympathizing with you. Of course, if it’s any consolation to you, one usually does lose one’s friends when they marry. But it needn’t have been as bad as this. What a thousand pities he couldn’t have fallen in love with a nice girl of his own kind. You couldn’t do anything about it when you went down in the spring?”
Oldmeadow had never said anything to Mrs. Aldesey about his hopes for Nancy. He had a secretive instinct for keeping his friendships in compartments and discussed only those portions that overflowed. “Nothing,” he said. “And the mischief was that I went down hostile, as you warned me against doing. Barney saw at once that I didn’t care for her; and she saw it at once. He even forced a sort of expression of opinion from me and I know now that it’s always glooming there at the back of his mind when he sees me. It was quite useless. Once he’d fallen under her spell it was all up with him. She has her singular power and, for a man in love with her, her singular charm. Even I, you know, understand that.”
Mrs. Aldesey contemplated him. “I confess I can’t,” she said. “She is so desperately usual. I’ve seen her everywhere, ever since I can remember. Attending lectures at the Sorbonne; listening to Wagner at Bayreuth; having dresses tried on at Worth’s; sitting in the halls of a hundred European hotels. She is the most unescapable form of the American woman; only not du peuple because of the money and opportunity that has also extirpated everything racy, provincial and individual.”
“I don’t know,” said Oldmeadow. He mused, his hands clasped behind his head. “She’s given me all sorts of new insights.” His eyes, after his wont, were on the cornice and his friend’s contemplation, relaxed a little from its alert responsiveness, allowed itself a certain conjectural softness as she watched him. “I feel,” he went on, “since knowing her, that I understand America, her America, better than you do. You’re engaged in avoiding rather than in understanding it, aren’t you? What you underrate, what Americans of your type don’t see—because, as you say, it’s so oppressively usual—is the power of her type. If it is a type; if she is as ordinary as you say. It’s something bred into them by the American assumption of the fundamental rightness of life; a confidence unknown before in the history of the world. An individual, not an institutional or social, confidence. They do, actually, seem to take their stand on the very universe itself. Whereas the rest of us have always had churches or classes to uphold us. They have all the absurdities and crudities of mere individualism. They have all the illusions of their ignorance. Yet I sometimes imagine, after I’ve seen her, that it’s a power we haven’t in the least taken into our reckoning. Isn’t it the only racial thing that America has produced—the only thing that makes them a race? It makes them independent of us, when we’ve always imagined, in our complacency, that they were dependent. It enables them to take what we have to give, but to do with it what they, not we, think best. And by Jove, who knows how far it will carry them! Not you, my dear Lydia. You’ll stay where you are—with us.”
His eyes had come back and down to her, and her gaze resumed its alertness and showed him that she found the picture he drew disquieting. “You mean it’s a new kind of civilization that will menace ours?”
“It’s not a civilization; that’s just what it’s not. It’s a state of mind. Perhaps it will menace us. Perhaps it does. We’ve underrated it; of that I’m sure; and underrated power is always dangerous. It will be faith without experience against experience without faith. What we must try for, if we’re not to be worsted, is to have both—to keep experience and to keep faith, too. Only so shall we be able to hold our own against Mrs. Barney. And even so we shan’t be able to prevent her doing things to us—and for us. She’ll do things for us that we can’t do for ourselves.” His mind reverted to the faces of the brougham. “In that way she’s bound to worst us. We’ll have to accept things from her.”
Oldmeadow’s eyes had gone back to the cornice and, in the silence that followed, Mrs. Aldesey, as she sat with folded arms, played absently with the lace ruffle at her wrist. The lace was an heirloom, like her rings, and the contemplation of them may have afforded her some sustainment. “She’s made you feel all that, then,” she remarked. “With her crook and her hat and her rose-wreathed lamb. If such a sardonic old lion as you does really grow bodeful before the rose-wreathed lamb there is, I own, reason to fear for the future. I’m glad I’m growing old. It would hurt me to see her cutting your claws.”