Cordelia looked across the breakfast table at her abstractedly.
"Why not?" she asked lazily.
Mrs. Spaulding looked up, about to speak. The right light, however, was not on Cordelia's brow, and there were certain bounds beyond which she had learned not to trespass. So she only sighed.
"Fall in love, my dear, a dozen times, if you like. But——"
And again Mrs. Spaulding sighed. Cordelia perhaps understood more than she pretended. Only that morning Mrs. Spaulding had read aloud to her a little note from Repellier—a most formal little note making excuses for being unable to join them in their box party at Wallack's.
From the first, almost, Cordelia had comprehended that silent unshifting drama, undreamed of by even its hero and central figure, the gentle, upright, honest old artist himself. At one time that patient but perverse adoration on the part of Mrs. Spaulding had impressed Cordelia as beautiful in its constancy, as ethereal in its very intangibility. But of late it was beginning to stand before her as the foolish caprice of a pertinacious and yet idle and dissatisfied woman.
But it was Mrs. Spaulding's one romance—wilful and unreasonable, yet none the less golden. Wealth had brought her many things, but out of the midst of her opulence she reached eagerly for the unattainable—seeking, without knowing it, for life's relieving burden of sorrow, for her woman's due heritage of tears.
"You ought to be happy," Cordelia one day had said to her; "you get everything you want." She had been trying to scold Cordelia out of a passing mood of discontent.
"I don't get anything I want," she had cried back at her bitterly. "We can't even have a Long Island place. We can't go to Aiken. We can't go abroad for a summer. Even if we did go, it would be on the wrong steamer, and we'd sit at the wrong table and meet the wrong people. And I can't drag Alfred to a Waldorf dance, and Horse Show week I've always had to sit up alone in a box like a bump on a log. And he insists on driving in the Park on Sundays—Sundays, mind you—and he always wants to go to Sherry's or Martin's for Saturday dinner, and wear a Tuxedo coat at a cotillon. Why we've even bought our house here on the wrong street, and to make it even worse we're on the wrong side of the street. We go and sit through those everlasting operas on the wrong night. When we leave town it's always at the wrong season. Then we come back wrong—about the time other people are leaving. Is it any wonder I feel like giving up? Why, Cordelia, my dear, you've met more people and got to be better known in five months than I have in five years!"
And she stirred her coffee with the vigor with which she had once dreamed to stir the social world.