It was this flood of new feeling that bore him, elated and fired with enthusiasm, to the first of Cordelia's and Mrs. Spaulding's receptions late that afternoon. Long beforehand he had determined not to attend this reception. Besides cutting into time which was not altogether his own, he was beginning to see the impossibility of any further incongruous vacillating between the sordidness of Chatham Square and the splendor of the upper West Side; the grim irony in those contrasting pictures of life stung him too unpleasantly. But in his hour of new enlightenment he overcame his older scruples. He had a stern duty of self-humiliation to perform and a once wavering integrity to redeem. And he fell to remembering little speeches that Cordelia Vaughan once had made, and little ways that clung to her, and the tints of her hair and the many little variable intonations of her voice. And thinking of these things he made his way up through the city toward her once more.
A fluttering striped awning and a strip of crimson carpet ran from the Spauldings' doorway to the curb, where forty carriages half blocked the street. It was clear to Hartley that Cordelia's first reception was not to be a failure. That he came conspicuously unadorned and unknown and on foot in no way troubled him as he made his way through the crowd of heterogeneous loungers that fringed the strip of crimson carpet. In other days he had been used to such things. Some touch of the scholar in him, too, contributed to his bearing that sense of remoteness which elevated him above such perturbations.
It was the memory for the second time of his pendulum-like alternating between two such strangely opposing existences, and the cutting, keen irony of the thing that heightened his color as he hurried in from liveried servant to servant, and suddenly found himself in a crush of flowers and waving plumes and rich gowns, with here and there the sober black of a dissonant and desolate-looking man. And above it all the hum of many voices and the breath of many perfumes rose and mingled.
The next moment he caught sight of Cordelia herself, where she stood beside Mrs. Spaulding, greeting her guests one by one and smiling her gratitude for each prettiness of speech borne to her by that tide of new-found friends. Hartley, across the intervening crush, noticed that she looked almost exquisite and flower-like in a gown of white stuff that seemed to accentuate her note of frailty. She reminded him, as he looked, of a pale yellow clicquot.
He noticed, too, that she received her homage with all the girlish dignity of an imperious young queen, a little too coldly and too haughtily, perhaps, and yet with a mild composure that was causing the honest-eyed Mrs. Spaulding to turn more than once in secret wonderment, and gaze at her admiringly. There was nothing in Cordelia's bearing to reveal any inner ruffling of a spirit tranquil and detached—nothing beyond the pale rose-like flush that had mounted to her softly undulating, almost gently hollowed cheeks, and the luminosity of her outwardly calm eyes.
Cordelia did not see Hartley in the odorous, rustling stream that was slowly bearing him toward her until he was almost at her side. Then she paled a little, and let her eyes rest on him keenly, speaking smilingly, as she looked, to a florid woman confronting her.
In a minute or two he himself was before her and had taken her hand. She had not expected him that afternoon.
"It was so charming of you to come, Mr. Hartley," she murmured. It was the same phrase he had already heard her say at least half a dozen times over; the formality of her welcome chilled him. He had forgotten there were a dozen persons at his heels.
"I had to come!" he confessed. Something earnest in his tone frightened her. She showed him by her glance that there were others hemming them in.
"Then you have read it?" she asked quickly, lowering her voice.