"You mean?"
"I mean that I have long had my suspicions."
But again the very perfection of his deceit brought Pauline that feeling that she had had since childhood that sense of an insidious influence always surrounding her, always menacing and yet never revealed. This influence, which Owen seemed to embody, was the antagonist of that other mysterious power, so real and yet so inexplicable, that warded and protected her—the spirit of the girl that had stepped from the mummy.
But Pauline had seen with her own eyes; she did not need any word of
Owen's to convince her of the falsity of her lover.
She was quite calm now. She dressed with the utmost care. Margaret, who had seen her in such anger only a short time before, was surprised at her sprightliness and graciousness. A slightly heightened color that only added to the luster of her loveliness, was the single sign of her inward thoughts. She summoned her own car and left the house alone.
The drawing room of the Clarence Courtelyou mansion was ablaze with light. There was a little too much light. The Clarence Courtelyou always had a little too much of everything.
There was a little too much money; there was a little too much gold leaf decoration in the drawing room, a little too much diamond decoration of Mrs. Courtelyou, and, if you were so fastidiously impolite as to say so, a little too much of Mrs. Courtelyou herself.
But Mrs. Courtelyou was struggling toward gentility in such an amiable way that better people liked her. The motherliness and sweet sincerity of her—the fact that she loved her frankly illiterate husband and worshipped, almost from afar, her cultured daughters was the thing that brought her down from the base height of the "climbers" and lifted her kindly, harmless personality to the high simplicities of the elite.
She made the natural mistake that other wealthy mendicants at the outer portals of society have made the mistake of pounding at the gates. Instead of letting the splendor of her charitable gifts, the gracefulness of her simplicity, carry her through, she went in for the gorgeous and the costly.
As a sort of crowning glory she began to "take up" artists and actors and musicians. She gained the good graces of the best of them, and in her kindly innocence she won the worship of the worst.