Frothingham looked interest and inquiry. “Ah—yes—quite so,” he said. “I believe we do let our middle-class look after all that sort of thing. It saves us a lot of bother.”
“I’m glad you admit the truth.” Mrs. Staunton looked gracious and triumphant. “Last winter we had the president of one of the colleges at Oxford with us—a very narrow man.”
“Frightful persons, all that sort, I think,” said Frothingham.
“I’m not astonished that you think so,” replied Mrs. Staunton. “He—it was Mr. Stebbins—scoffed at the idea that Boston spoke English. He insisted that whatever your upper class speaks is English, that they have the right to determine the language.”
That was Frothingham’s own notion, but he gave no sign. “Stebbins is a hideous old jabberwock,” he said, glad that the orchestra was beginning.
He had accidentally, but naturally, stumbled into the road to Mrs. Staunton’s good graces. She wanted acquiescent listeners only; he disliked talking and abhorred argument. She was living at the Waldorf also, and this gave him his opportunity. She found him most agreeable. He had the great advantage of being free all day, while her New York men friends were at work then—and she did not like women. She insisted it was only the New York woman—“so trivial, so childish in her tastes for show and for farcical amusements”—that she did not like; but the fact was that she did not like any women anywhere. Nominally, she was in New York to visit her sister, Mrs. Findlay, but she rarely saw her. “I can’t endure staying in Henrietta’s house,” she explained to Frothingham. “She has fallen from grace. If anything, she out-Herods the New York women—always the way with renegades. And she lets her housekeeper and her butler run her household—dust everywhere, things going to ruin, the servants often drunk. If I were in the house I could not be silent; so I stay at a hotel when I make my annual visit to her.”
She invited Frothingham to come to her at Boston in the second week in January—and he accepted. She had said never a word to him about her niece, Cecilia Allerton, and for that very reason he knew that she was revolving some plan for bringing them together. He also knew that Cecilia Allerton’s father, head of the great Boston banking house of Allerton Brothers & Monson, was rich enough to give his daughter the dower necessary to admission into the Gordon-Beauvais family.
In the two weeks between Mrs. Staunton’s departure and his engagement to follow her he did not neglect his business. But his assiduity was wasted. He saw chances to marry, and marry well—but no dowers worth his while. Many mothers beamed on him, and their daughters brightened at his approach; but not one of the families that might have had him for the faintest hinting showed any matrimonial interest in him. One mother, Mrs. Brandon, actually snubbed him as if he were a mere vulgar, poor, and untitled fortune-hunter—and the snub was unprovoked, as he was only courteous to Miss Brandon. When Frothingham laughed over this incident to Honoria she said: “Mrs. Brandon purposes to marry Estelle to Walter Summit.”
“That chuckle-head? Why, I found him in the cloak-room at the Merivale dance the other night sitting with his big damp hands in his lap, and his mouth hanging open. And he wasn’t screwed, either.”
“But Estelle isn’t marrying him. She’s marrying his forty millions. With what she’ll inherit from her father and her uncle that will make her the third richest woman in New York. The fact that Walter is slightly imbecile is rather in his favour—she’ll have a free hand, and that’s everything where a woman’s ambitious. If you Englishmen hadn’t the reputation of being masterful in your own households you’d have less difficulty in marrying here. It was a bad day for English marriages when the American woman learned that England is a man’s country. A girl brought up as are the girls here nowadays hates to abdicate—and she don’t have to if she marries an American.”