She was trembling with alarm. “Just tell him that I called up, and that I’d like to speak to him when he comes in”—this in a rather shaky voice, for a great fear was gathering in around her, a fear that he had become offended at her father’s stinginess and bartering and bargaining, and had decided to withdraw.
She wandered uneasily from room to room. She sat at the telephone several times—once she had the receiver off the hook before she changed her mind about trying to reach him. She ordered her victoria and got ready for the street, to drive about in the hope of accidentally meeting him. At the door she changed her mind again. As she was turning back a boy came by, shouting an extra—“All about the Earl of Frothingham! Big sensation!” She saw that the boy knew who she was, knew that she was supposed to be engaged to Frothingham, was clamouring in that neighbourhood because he thought sales would be briskest there. She fled into the house—but sent a servant out by the basement way to buy the paper.
The headlines were large and black. Frothingham, the story ran, had got into debt in England so deeply that his creditors found he could not pay more than a few pence in the pound; they had consulted as to ways and means of recovering, had organised themselves into a syndicate, had put up five thousand pounds to “finance” him for a hunt for a rich wife in America. “And,” concluded the account, “this exposure comes barely in time to block his attempt to marry the beautiful daughter of one of the richest meat packers in Chicago, moving in our smartest smart set.”
She did not know that this tale was a deliberately false diversion of the facts about a syndicated German prince who had visited Chicago several years before and had almost married there. The truth as to his enterprise had just come out on the other side through the collapse of the Rontivogli syndicate; and the newspaper, relying for immunity on Frothingham’s aloneness, and on his well-understood mercenary designs, had substituted his name for the German’s. She read and believed. She had known from the outset that his main motive was money. But she had succeeded in disguising this unsightly truth in the same flowers of her crudely romantic imagination in which she disguised the truth as to her craving for a coronet. Now it was as if the flowers had been torn away to the last concealing petal and had left exposed things more hideous than she thought were there.
She hid her face and cried a little—“I despise him. Besides, if I went on and married him, what would people say?”
It would have taken finer scales than those available for weighing human motives to decide which of the two reasons embodied in those two sentences was the heavier. She dried her eyes and sat with her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand.
“That’s the best thing to do, every way I look at it,” she said aloud slowly at the end of half an hour’s thought.
She went to the telephone, called up the offices of the Great Western and Southern Railway, asked and got the General Manager. “Is that you, Mr. Burster? Is that you, Tom? Meet me in the parlours of the Auditorium right way.” And she rang off and telephoned to the stable for her victoria.
Ten minutes later she was driving down the avenue in her largest, most beplumed black hat and a pale blue carriage-coat that produced the wonted effect of her public appearances—Burster once said to her: “Jeanne, you’re the only thing on earth than can stop traffic in the streets of Chicago. You can do in two seconds more than a blizzard could do in a week.”
She returned at half-past five. Her father and mother were in the front sitting room upstairs, gloomy as the lake in the dusk of a cloudy day. She entered, whistling and tilting her big hat first over her right eye, then over her left. “Don’t look so cheerful,” she said, patting her mother on the cheek and pulling her father’s beard.