"My dear Elizabeth," said Mrs. Bobby, "I regret to say it, but you really are growing terribly spoiled."
The winter was far advanced when Mrs. Bobby made this remark. With Lent growing every day nearer, the whirl of gaiety grew ever faster and more furious. It was not often that Mrs. Bobby and her guest had an opportunity for private conversation. But to-night, as it happened, they had merely been out to dinner, and having returned at an unusually early hour, Elizabeth came into Mrs. Bobby's boudoir in her long white dressing-gown, and sat brushing out her masses of wavy hair, while she and her hostess discussed the evening's entertainment, and other recent events of interest.
Mrs. Bobby's eyes rested upon Elizabeth with all the satisfaction with which a connoisseur regards some beautiful object of which he has been the discoverer. Elizabeth's beauty, Elizabeth's conquests, formed to Mrs. Bobby just then a theme of which she never tired. Nor did she fail to make them the text for various sermons that she delivered to Bobby about this time, on the subject of her own wisdom, and his utter failure as a prophet.
"Confess, Bobby, that my plans turn out well," she would say, "and that I'm not such a fool as you thought me."
"Why, I never," Bobby would protest, "thought you anything of the kind." But she would go on unheeding:
"It would have been a shame for that girl to be buried in the country, and I do take some credit to myself for having rescued her from such a fate. But after that, all the credit is due to Elizabeth. I did what I could, of course, to launch her successfully, but when all is said and done, a girl has to sink or swim on her own merits. Elizabeth takes to society as a duck does to water; it's her natural element. And talk of heredity! There are not many girls with the most aristocratic mothers who can come into a room with the air that she has, as if she didn't care two straws whether any one spoke to her or not, and then of course every one does. Now explain to me, Bobby, if you can, where the girl gets that air."
"I suppose," said Bobby, "if I believed implicitly in heredity (which I am not at all sure that I do) I'd account for it by your own remark that she has plenty of good blood as well as bad."
"Oh, yes," said Mrs. Bobby, incredulously, "you can always make a theory fit in somehow."
But though Mrs. Bobby exulted in that air of indifference with which Elizabeth accepted, as if it were a mere matter of course, all the devotion offered up at her feet, she was beginning to realize that the most admirable qualities can be carried too far. And thus it was that she upbraided her this evening with being unreasonably spoiled, and not sufficiently appreciating the good things which had fallen to her lot.
"I don't know what you want me to do," Elizabeth said, quietly, when she had listened for some moments to this rather vague accusation. "I'm sure I go everywhere that I'm asked, and that, you must admit, is saying a good deal; I talk to all the men who talk to me, and that again you must admit, means a great deal of conversational effort; and—and I make no distinctions between them whatever, and do my duty on all occasions. I really don't know what more you can expect."