“Believe? To be sure. Everyone does, except ghastly middle-class cranks. Some of ’em go crazy and are pious every day. Others go crazy and chuck it all. They run to extremes—that’s bad form. I don’t like extremes.”
Mrs. Sullivan looked at Frothingham suspiciously. His face was always serious, but the eyeglass and the drawl and the shadow of a hint of irony in his tone raised a doubt. She returned to her original question: “They tell me that the women—the fashionable women—swear a great deal in New York now—that it’s the latest fad.”
“I can’t say that they ever swore at me—much,” replied Frothingham. “But then, you know, I’m rather meek. It’s possible they might if I’d baited ’em.”
“A few of our women here—those that hang round horses and stables all the time—have taken up swearing. It is said that they contracted the habit in New York and Newport. But I doubted it.”
“Perhaps it’s the horses that make ’em swear,” suggested Frothingham. “Horses are such stupid brutes.”
“And they smoke—but that’s an old story. All the women smoke in New York, don’t they?”
“I’m not observant. You see, I don’t see well unless I look sharp.”
Mrs. Sullivan smiled amiably. “You’re very discreet, Lord Frothingham. You don’t gossip—I detest it myself.”
She talked to the man at her left, but soon turned to him with: “Doesn’t it shock you, the way divorce is growing nowadays? It’s almost as bad in England, I understand, as it is with us. We’re taking up all the habits of the common sort of people. Really, I try to be broad-minded, but I can’t keep up with the rising generation. A young married woman called on me this afternoon—she and her husband are of our best families. She told me she was engaged to a young married man in New York. ‘But,’ said I, ‘you’re both married.’ ‘We’re going to get our divorces in the spring,’ she said. She asked me not to say anything about her engagement—‘for,’ said she, ‘we haven’t announced it. I’ve not told my husband yet that I’m going to get a divorce, and my fiancé hasn’t told his wife.’ What do you think of that, Lord Frothingham?”
“Devilish enterprising, isn’t it, now? That’s what we call a Yankee notion. Do you think it’ll be a go?”