One night he was entertaining a group of his friends at poker in our house. Will Macon, Jack Moseby, Will Townsend, John Kerr and John Good, all from good families, were there. After the game was over he planned to serve them an elaborate champagne supper which our servants were in the habit of preparing whenever Tabor and I entertained.
I was upstairs alone. Tabor was away on one of his business trips. I got to brooding about how unfair everyone in Denver had been both to him and me. They had punished him politically for nothing else than that he had fallen in love with another woman, and they had cruelly ignored me, making me suffer over and over again for having given myself to the man I loved before we were married. No one gave me credit for being a tender mother and faithful wife. They merely stared at me with their noses in the air.
But stare, they did. When I would attend the theatre and sit in Box A (which Tabor had had re-upholstered in white satin), they would raise their opera glasses or lorgnettes to study every detail of my costume. Then they would go away and have their own cheap dressmakers copy my designs. My clothes and hats were good enough to imitate, but I was not good enough to be received!
The more I thought about this, the more furious I grew. I jumped to my feet and began to pace up and down the floor.
“It’s all so unjust,” I thought to myself. “The very mothers and sisters of those bachelors downstairs are making me pay today for something I did long ago. I didn’t hurt Augusta—why should they hurt me?”
As I paced, my temper mounted. Finally, in a burst of rage, I ran down the large oak stairs and into the dining room where the young men were seated at table, laughing and talking. I stamped my foot.
“If I’m not good enough for your mothers and sisters to call on, how can my food be good enough for you to eat?” I demanded at the top of my voice. My hands trembled with the fury their easy-going faces aroused in my breast.
Pete looked up at me, startled at my behavior. It was hardly news, my not being accepted. The situation had gone on for years. The expression on his face only infuriated me further. I stamped my foot again.
“Go on and get out!” I shrieked. “If your women haven’t got enough manners to call on me, I don’t want you around here eating my food and drinking my wine.”
The boys had risen at my sudden entrance. Now, embarrassed by my attack, they began to put down the morsels of food they still had in their hands. With heads down, they began shuffling from the room.