"I don't know," she said, "what she meant, but one thing I understand—that my social career is ended." With a little pale smile, she swept aside the cards of invitation, locked them into a drawer and left the room.
Chapter XXXI
Mrs. Bobby regained her carriage, and consulting her engagement book, she ordered her coachman to drive her to the house of one of her friends, whose "day at home" it was. It was a sudden resolution. She had gone about very little that winter, since she had no longer the incentive of chaperoning Elizabeth, and had not paid a visit for weeks, on the plea of mourning for an uncle. But now she set her teeth and said to herself that she must mingle with the world to find out, if possible, what the world was saying.
Was it fancy, or did she distinguish, as she stood in the hall of Mrs. Van Alden's house leaving cards, amidst the hum of voices in the drawing-room, words that bore upon her own fevered anxiety? "Shocking affair," and "so she is really involved in it"—surely she heard those sentences. And then the conversation ceased abruptly as the butler drew aside the portière and she stood for a moment on the threshold. Her eyes were bright, her head erect; she glanced around taking mental stock as it were of the company. Five or six women were seated about a blazing wood fire, with an air unusual at functions of this kind of having come to stay and of forming—or this again might have been her fancy—a sort of council of justice. There was Mrs. Lansdowne, to whose ball Elizabeth had not been invited; and there was Sibyl Hartington, and one or two others who knew Mrs. Bobby and did not, as it happened, love her very much. "Enemies," she thought, drawing her breath sharply, "and discussing Elizabeth and me! It's the same thing—I'm sure I feel as if it were I under suspicion." Eleanor Van Antwerp had certainly never known such a feeling before, but her bearing had never been more instinct with the nonchalant confidence of a woman who seems absolutely unconscious of her position, for the reason that it has never been questioned.
"I seem to have interrupted the conversation," she observed, lightly, after she had been rather nervously greeted and kissed by her hostess, and had taken her place in the circle. "Some one was telling a very interesting story—I caught fragments of it as I came in." She glanced her eye round the group. "It was you, Kitty, I think," she said. "Won't you—please—begin the story over again and tell it for my benefit?"
"Kitty," thus appealed to, colored and bit her lip. "Oh, the story isn't really worth repeating," she said, hastily. She had no wish to offend Mrs. Van Antwerp, and was heartily wishing that she had not spoken so loud. Sibyl Hartington helped her out by observing, with her placid smile:
"It's a story about a friend of yours, my dear Eleanor, so Kitty is afraid to tell it."