When she returned from the telephone it was with a cordial invitation for him from Mrs. Galloway. He said: “I’ve a letter to a Mrs. Saalfield in Boston. Do you know her?”
“Yes—she’s here now, I think. But you would better keep away from her. She wouldn’t do you the least good.”
“Is she out of ‘the push’?”
“Oh, no—she leads it there, I believe. But she wouldn’t let you look at a girl or a widow, or any woman but herself. She’s about forty years old—it used to be the woman of thirty, but it’s the woman of forty now. Everywhere she goes she trails a train of young men. They’re afraid to look away from her. They watch her like a pack of hungry collies, and she watches them like a hen-hawk.”
There was more than the spirit of friendly helpfulness in Honoria’s plan to send him away to Boston. The bottom fact—hidden even from herself—was that she was tired of him. He seemed to her helpless and incapable, worse in that respect than any but the very poorest specimens of men she had met in New York. She felt that he was looking to her to see him through an adventure of which she disapproved rather than approved. She had no intention of accepting such a burden, yet she was too good-natured and liked him too well to turn him abruptly adrift.
Mrs. Galloway took him in to dinner, and it was not until the second act of the opera that he had a chance to talk with the Boston woman in the party—Mrs. Staunton. Then he slipped into the chair behind her; but she would not talk while the curtain was up. Grand opera bored him, so he passed the time in gazing round the grand-tier boxes—the Galloway box was to the left of the centre. The twilight was not dark enough to hide the part of the show that interested him. He knew New York fashionable society well now, and as he looked he noted each woman and recalled how many millions she represented. “Gad, how rich they are—these beggars,” he thought enviously. And he was seized by a mild attack of what an eminent New York lawyer describes as “the fury of the parasite”—that hate which succeeds contempt in the parasite as its intended victim eludes it.
When the curtain went down on the last of seven uproarious calls—the opera was “Carmen,” and Calvé was singing it—Mrs. Staunton’s disdainful expression gave him the courage to say: “Ghastly row they make, eh?”
Mrs. Staunton was perhaps fifty years old, long and thin, with a severe profile and a sweet and intelligent, if somewhat too complacent, front face. “Calvé sings rather well—in spots,” she said. “But I doubt if Boston would have given her seven calls.”
The mirthful shine of Frothingham’s right eye might have been a reflection from his glass; again, it might have been really in his eye where it seemed to be—Mrs. Staunton was so seated that she could not see him as he talked over her shoulder into her ear. “Really,” was all he said.
“You’ve not been at Boston?” asked Mrs. Staunton.