With love, always affectionately,
Maybel Parke Rodney.
V
From an Uninvited.
Thursday.
My Darling George:
I hope this letter will reach you before you leave Minneapolis. I do wish you would leave politics alone, if they're going to take you away like this. Believe me, the country can get along much better without you than I can! When we are married you have got to give them up. When we are married, too, and this bore of a divorce of mine is finally settled, I presume I shall be invited to Mrs. Makeway's parties! I wasn't asked last night to her big ball!—not that I care. I am sure that beast of a husband of mine will never be able to prove his nasty charges against us, and that I shall win the case. Then there'll be no excuse for Mrs. Makeway and her prudish set, and I promise you they shall eat "humble pie," if there's any left in the world after all my dear friends have made me devour. Tom has been making overtures to my maid through a detective, but Lena is faithful to us, and I've promised her double any sum they offer her. When my position is all right again, I shall go in for society in the most extravagant, splendid way for one long, brilliant, spiteful season, and I shall punish every one of these women who have snubbed me so terribly. After all, half of them owe their positions in the world to my family, and with my family to back me there will be no trouble about my being absolutely reinstated. My people will back me up, too, for we have never had a scandal up till now. We have been almost the only family left.
Of course the papers are full of the Makeway ball, and the pictures of Mrs. Makeway are too deliciously absurd for anything. One looks like that one of me in the Evening News when I gave my evidence. I really believe it's the same picture. I hear that she looked rather well with her famous pearls on (which, between you and me, I believe are false), and her tiara, which all the out-of-town people go to the opera to see. But they say she was dressed entirely too young, and showed she thought her own party a great success. However, what can you expect? She was nobody; her family are most ordinary people, the kind that are prominent in some unfashionable church and influential in its Sunday-school. O, la-la-la-la! She prides herself on having an ancestor of some sort who fought in the War of Independence—a common soldier, I suppose, in Washington's army; that's why she has had an office in the "Daughters of the Revolution." We had several ancestors in the war—commissioned officers; and they all fought for King George, thank heaven; and if they had only won my father would have been the third Lord Banner, probably, if not something better. So hang Mrs. Makeway! Her daughter is an ugly little creature; she hasn't a single feature that doesn't go its own way irrespective of the others, and with a total disregard for the tout ensemble of the poor girl's face. You know the sort of thing—each feature seems to be minding the other's business. Her teeth look lovely, but I believe some of them are "crowns"—they do that sort of thing so well nowadays! What I will grant her is a beautiful figure, but my corset-maker, who is hers, too, gives me her word of honor she laces awfully! They say she had the best time of any girl at the ball; which, if you ask me, I think beastly taste.
The house everyone says looked very beautiful—of course, money will do everything—and the music was superb for the same reason, and the supper not too extravagant. (I suppose they economized on that!) But lots of people I've met say they were bored to death, and that there was an awful crowd. It's extraordinary the people she had there! How she got them I don't know—all the swells. But dear me, after all, that's nothing; swells will go to anyone who'll amuse them. I hear old Makeway looked fearfully miserable, and, instead of paying other women compliments, made love to his own wife all the evening. It's extraordinary, because he is really a gentleman. His great-grandfather and my great-grandfather were great chums; made their money, I think, in the same business.
By the way, the Pinkertons have written me that they have still more evidence against Tom. They say she is "doing a turn"—whatever that is—in some variety theatre. According to accounts she did Tom for a good deal—just served him right.