Mrs. Spaulding usually breakfasted at half-past eleven, just four hours later than her husband. That gentleman, indeed, had passed through half a day of delirious Wall Street business before the plump and loosely gowned figure of his belated spouse rustled languidly down to the breakfast room.
Mrs. Spaulding—and at the breakfast hour above all other times—liked to believe that she was a very ill-used and lonely woman. If a touch of forlorn desolation did cling about her even days, it was a desolation quite different to her husband's. Through her loneliness she still groped for something tangible and material; he found little toward which he cared to reach.
He had first made his money in wheat, at Indianapolis. Later he had doubled a substantial fortune by prompt and shrewd investments in the then half-prospected iron-mines of the Lake Superior district. He was an honest and simple-minded man, with a straight-forward and workaday bent of mind, who still fretted at idleness, and was still wordlessly oppressed by the gaieties of life when they chanced to fall before the hour of the dinner gong and the Tuxedo coat.
It was not until his fortune had crept up to the million mark that he ventured to ask for the hand of the youthful and overpretty Lillian Bunting, a belle in her time, and a young lady, it was said, with marked social aspirations for the Middle West.
Then, as time went on and brought with it an increase of prosperity, she hungered, as a millionaire's wife, for that mystic urban El Dorado of the affluent American, New York. Though he felt that he was sacrificing a few hundred thousand by the migration, Alfred Spaulding finally came East and built a handsome home for himself and his wife on West Seventy-second Street.
It was all very dreary and very lonely for them both during their first two years in this new home. But little by little Alfred Spaulding drifted back to that world of business and strenuous effort which constituted life for him. And day by day Mrs. Spaulding hovered more and more closely about that high-walled garden where worldly wealth flowered into sensuous affluence, though as the mere wife of an unknown millionaire she seldom alighted on the borders of society, which to the end she insisted in describing as "The Four Hundred."
But if she could not dine and dance and drive with them, she still had left to her the compensating pleasures of dining and dancing and driving in their wake. She could still reserve their tables at the cafés on off evenings, and their boxes at the theaters when they were elsewhere. There was nothing to prevent their milliners from making hats for her own aspiring head, and she could still buy her jewelry and her flowers in the same shops with them, and even drive bewilderingly near them in the Park.
Then came the advent of Cordelia Vaughan. The young authoress from Kentucky was just at the zenith of her fame; The Silver Poppy had, as Mr. Henry Slater described it, "set the Hudson on fire"; her new-found friends were still reprovingly demanding why she held back her second volume, and publishers, it was said, were besieging her for manuscripts. The public press, too, was hinting from time to time that the new Kentucky beauty was laboring on a mysterious volume that was to shake society to its very foundations. Then it was whispered about that she wrote only from memory, that she was living the romance which later should appear in type. Photographers sent to her, begging for a sitting. Niccia, the sculptor, made a little bust of her, and declared she had the only Greek nose in America, and there was a poem or two indited to her "sad, sad crown of golden hair," as one melancholy versifier had put it.
Cordelia Vaughan was indeed a very much talked about young lady, and it was just at this juncture that Mrs. Alfred Spaulding had swooped down on her and triumphantly carried her off, very much like a plump hen-hawk making away with a homeless duckling. She was still delightfully childlike and ingenuous for one already so great. The poor girl, Mrs. Spaulding held, needed a mother's care. She was giving up too much to her work. She must have more amusement, more diversion. She should have a little den of her own, and she should work when she wanted to, and play when she wanted to. She should be as free as though she were in her own home. It was, too, in no way mildly hinted that under the roof of such a patroness she would have unrivaled opportunities for studying the foibles and weaknesses of New York's most exclusive circles. In fact, Mrs. Spaulding would give a series of receptions and teas and things for her, for she had always wanted to see more of those dear, untidy Bohemians with the long hair.