But Cornelia threw herself down passionately at her mother’s feet. “No! No! No!” she sobbed, over and over again; and in this half-articulate anguish, Mrs. Cromwell read and understood Cornelia’s secret indeed. She was compassionate, yet all the more confirmed in her belief that the decision just made with her husband was a wise one.
Cornelia could bring no eloquence to alter her fate. “No! No! No!” was only her protest against what she understood was inevitable, though, as she wept brokenly upon her pillow that night, she thought of one resource that would avoid the inevitable, so desperate she was. But she decided to live, and found living hardest when she was on her way to the train next day, and the route chosen by her father’s chauffeur cruelly passed the Blue Tea Room.
On the train, thinking of the flying miles that so bitterly lengthened between her and that sacred little blue-painted room, she came to the end of the song her heart had chanted there in time to a tapping foot;—it was the refrain of the car wheels upon the humming rails all that aching way:
I tell each bead unto the end and there
A cross is hung.
XIV
MRS. DODGE’S NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOUR
AT FIVE o’clock upon a February afternoon the commodious rooms on the lower floor of Mrs. Cromwell’s big house resounded with all the noise that a hundred women unaided by firearms could make. A hundred men, gathered in a similar social manner, if that were possible, might either be quiet or produce a few uproariously bellowing groups, a matter depending upon the presence or absence of noisy individuals; but a hundred habitually soft-voiced women, brought together for a brief enjoyment of one another’s society and a trifling incidental repast, must almost inevitably abandon themselves to that vocal rioting ultimately so helpful to the incomes of the “nerve specialists.”
The strain, of course, is not put upon the nerves by the overpitched voices alone. At times during Mrs. Cromwell’s “tea” the face of almost every woman in the house was distressed by the expression of caressive animation maintained upon it. The most conscientious of the guests held this expression upon their faces from the moment they entered the house until they left it; they went about from room to room, from group to group, shouting indomitably; and, without an instant’s relaxation, kept a sweet archness frozen upon their faces, no matter how those valiant faces ached.
Men may not flatter themselves in believing it is for them that women most ardently sculpture their expressions. A class of women has traduced the rest: those women who are languid where there are no men. The women at Mrs. Cromwell’s “tea,” with not a man in sight, so consistently moulded their faces that the invitations might well have read, “From Four to Six: a Ladies’ Masque.”