The appearance of a new name among the list of socially known always stirred an indignation in her. She was not a bounder herself. The closely knit organization whose members poured tea, gave bazaars, occupied boxes at the theater had been, in her mind, a fixed and invulnerable institution neither to be taken by storm nor won by strategy. Thus she had excused her lack of social ambition and success by investing Society with an almost magical aloofness, a sort of superhuman cotorie of tea pourers and benefit givers that kept itself intact and beyond intrusion by the exercise of incredible diligence.
Among her day dreams during these years had been those of magnificent social successes, of long newspaper articles describing with awe her splendor and prestige. But in reality she would as soon have thought of breaking into society as of attacking twelve policemen with a carving knife. She resented therefore the appearance of new names in the society columns.
"Bounders," she would murmur to herself, half expecting that the Organization into which they had bounded would issue some outraged and withering excommunication upon the new tea pourer. But the name would appear again and again and after such innumerable appearances Mrs. Basine would automatically accept its presence within the Organization and rally quixotically to its defense against the other bounders struggling to invade the sanctity it had achieved.
And although during this period of her life Mrs. Basine had felt none of the low instincts which inspired the bounders to bound, she had endeavored to the best of her abilities to mimic as much as a humble outsider could the spiritual elegancies which distinguished the Organization. She succeeded in creating a formal atmosphere about her home, a dignity about her table of which she was modestly proud. She had felt in secret that any member of the Organization entering her house—an event of which she dreamed as a waveringly sophisticated child might dream of a fairy's visit—would have experienced no dismay.
Now this attitude which had characterized her married life was changing. Society was no longer an impregnable Organization. Mrs. Basine was, in fact, engaged determinedly upon its conquest and her attitude toward the detestable Mrs. Gilchrist was colored by that fact. An acquaintanceship with the Gilchrists had been achieved through manœuverings of her daughters as workers in charity bazaars managed by the woman.
Until the death of her husband Mrs. Basine had ignored her two daughters. A proprietory feeling in them which exhausted itself in dictating the surface details of their lives had been the extent of her interest. She had presumed during their childhood and adolescence that they were Basines—and nothing else. This had guided her parenthood. Being Basines, they must conform to Basinism which meant that they must be like their mother or their father and she struggled carelessly to see that their youth did not assert itself in ways inimical to her own characterization. Doris the younger was inclined to be beautiful. Fanny, however, had always seemed to her a more substantial person.
But her widowhood had brought a belated curiosity concerning these young women. She wondered at times what their dreams were. She understood that they were strangers and this began to interest her. She was proud of them and although undemonstrative would sometimes put her arms around both of them as they walked to a neighbor's after dinner.
They did not inspire the pride in her, however, that her son did. George had finished his law and she felt as she listened to him talk or watched his face at the table that he was somebody. There was an assurance and health about him. His keen-featured face, the straight black hair parted in the center, the movements of his lithe body, always quick and definite—and particularly his hands—these made her think of him vaguely as an artist, somebody different. She knew in her heart that although he seemed to differ in his ideas from none of their friends, he was not like other young men.