Her two auditors stared at her incredulously, so that she could plainly see how shocked they were; but, before either of them spoke, a beautiful change in look and manner came upon them. Both of them elevated their chins a little, so that their faces slanted more toward heaven than toward earth; both of them seemed about to smile angelically, but stopped just short of smiling; a purified softness came into their eyes; and, altogether, by means of various other subtle little manifestations, the two ladies began to look noble.
Mrs. Dodge had turned her back toward the group about the hostess, but without looking round she understood what the change in her two companions portended. “Good-bye, ladies of Shalott,” she said. “The curse has come upon you!” And she moved away, just as the ennobled two stepped forward to meet Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite in her approach to them.
“Clever of me!” Mrs. Dodge thought, with some bitterness. “Getting myself the reputation of a ‘dangerous woman’!” For she understood well enough that she would do no injury to Mrs. Braithwaite in attacking her;—on the contrary, the injury would inevitably be to the assailant; and yet Mrs. Dodge could not forbear from a little boomerang practice at this shining and impervious mark. The reason, unfortunately, was personal, as most reasons are: Mrs. Dodge had come to the “tea” in an acute state of irritation that had been increasing since morning. In fact, she had begun the day with a breakfast-table argument of which Mrs. Braithwaite was the subject.
Mr. Dodge made the unfortunate admission that he had recently sent Mrs. Braithwaite a check for a hundred dollars, his subscription to the Workers’ Welfare League; and he was forced into subsequent admissions: he had no interest in the Workers’ Welfare League, and could give no reason for sending a check to it except that Mrs. Braithwaite had written him appealing for a subscription. She was sure he wouldn’t like to miss the chance to aid in so splendid a movement, she said. Now, as Mrs. Braithwaite had previously written twice to Mrs. Dodge in almost the same words, and as Mrs. Dodge had twice replied declining to make a donation, the argument (so to call it) on Mrs. Dodge’s part was a heated one. It availed her husband little to protest that he had never heard of Mrs. Braithwaite’s appeals to his wife; Mrs. Dodge was too greatly incensed to be reasonable.
Later in the day she was remorseful, realizing that she had taken poor Mr. Dodge for her anvil because he was within reach, and what she really wanted to hammer wasn’t. Her remorse applied itself strictly to her husband, however, and she had none for her feeling toward the lady next door. Mrs. Dodge and her neighbour had never discovered any point of congeniality: Mrs. Braithwaite’s high serenity, which Mrs. Dodge called suavity, was of so paradoxical a smoothness that Mrs. Dodge said it “rubbed the wrong way from the start.” The uncongeniality had increased with time until it became a settled dislike, so far as Mrs. Dodge was concerned; and now, after Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s successful appeal to Mr. Dodge for what Mr. Dodge’s wife had refused, the dislike was rankling itself into a culmination not unlike an actual and lusty hatred.
Mrs. Dodge realized her own condition;—she knew hatred is bad for the hater; but she could not master the continuous anger within her. Fascinated, she watched Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite at the “tea”; could not help watching her, although, as the victim of this fascination admitted to herself in so many words, the sight was “poison” to her. Nor was the poison alleviated by the effect of Mrs. Braithwaite upon the other guests: everywhere the angelic presence moved about the capacious rooms it was preceded and followed by deference. And when Mrs. Braithwaite joined a woman or a group of women, Mrs. Dodge marked with a hot eye how that woman or group of women straightway hushed a little and looked noble.
XV
MRS. DODGE DECLINES TO TELL
MRS. DODGE went home early. “I oughtn’t to have come,” she told her hostess, confidentially, in parting. “I try to be a Christian sometimes, but this is one of the days when I think Nero was right.”
“But what——”