"What a nuisance," she was saying to herself. "Why did I let myself be surprised into attracting her attention? Now, I'll have to do something for her—we're really under obligations to her father—I don't believe Joe has paid back the last of that loan yet. Well, I can use her occasionally to take Joe off my hands. She looks all right—really, it's amazing how she has improved in dress. She seems to know how to put on her clothes now. But she's too retiring to be dangerous. A woman who's presentable yet not dangerous is almost desirable, is as rare as an attractive man."
The delusion of our own importance is all but universal—and everywhere most happy; but for it, would not life's cynicism broaden from the half-hidden smirk into a disheartening sneer? Among fashionable people, narrow, and carefully educated only in class prejudice and pretentious ignorance, this delusion becomes an obsession. The whole hardworking, self-absorbed world is watching them—so they delight in imagining—is envying them, is imitating them. Letty assumed that Neva had kept away through awe, and that she would now take advantage of her politeness to cling to her and get about in society; as Mrs. Morris thought of nothing but society, she naturally felt that the whole world must be similarly occupied. She would have been astounded could she have seen into Neva's mind—seen the debate going on there as to how to entrench herself against annoyance from her cousin. "Shall I refuse her invitation?" thought Neva. "Or, is it better to go Saturday night, and have done with, since I must go to her house once?" She reluctantly decided for Saturday night. "And after that I can plead my work; and soon she'll forget all about me. It's ridiculous that people who wish to have nothing to do with each other should be forced by a stupid conventionality to irritate themselves and each other."
Saturday afternoon, each debated writing the other, postponing the engagement. Neva had a savage attack of the blues; at such times she shut herself in, certain she could not get from the outside the cheer she craved and too keen to be content with the cheer that would offer shallow, wordy sympathy, or, worse still, self-complacent pity. As for Letitia, she was quarreling with her husband—about money as usual. She was one of those doll-looking women who so often have serpentine craft and wills of steel. Morris adored her, after the habit of men with such women; she made him feel so big and strong and intellectually superior; and her childish, clinging ways were intoxicating, as she had great physical charm, she so cool and smooth and golden white and delicately perfumed. She always got her own way with everyone; usually her husband, her "master," yielded at the first onset. Once in a while—and this happened to be of those times—he held out for the pleasure of seeing her pout and weep and then, as he yielded, burst into a radiance like sunshine through summer rain. If she had had money of her own he might have got a sudden and even shocking insight into the internal machinery of that doll's head; as it was, his delusion about the relative intelligence and strength of himself and his Letty was intact.
Mrs. Joe did not share his enthusiasm for these "love-tilts"; she did not mind employing the "doll game" in her dealings with the world, but she would have liked to be her real self at home. This, however, was impossible if she was to get the largest results in the quickest and easiest way. So she wearily played on at the farce, and at times grew heartsick with envy of the comparatively few independent—which means financially independent—women of her set, and disliked her Joe when she was forced to think about him distinctly, which was not often. In marriages where the spirit has shriveled and died within the letter, habit soon hardens a wife to an amazing degree toward practical unconsciousness of the existence of her husband, even though he be uxorious. Letty's married life bored her; but she had no more sense of degradation in thus making herself a pander, and for hire, than had her husband, at the same business downtown. She saw so many of the "very best" women doing just as she did, using each the fittest form of cajolery and cozening to wheedle money for extravagances out of their husbands, that it seemed as much the proper and reputable thing as going to bullfights seems to Spaniards, or watching wild beasts devour men, women, and children seemed to the "very best" people of imperial Rome. For the same reason, her husband did not linger upon the real meaning of the phrase "legal adviser" whereunder the business of himself and his brother lawyers was so snugly and smugly masked—the business of helping respectable scoundrels glut bestial appetites for other people's property without fear of jail.
The quarrel had so far advanced that Saturday night was the logical time for the climax in sentimental reconciliation. However, Mrs. Morris decided to endure a twenty-four hours' delay and "get Neva over with." She repented the instant Neva appeared. "I had no idea she could be so good looking," thought she, in a panic at the prospect of rivalry, with desirable available men wofully scarce. She swept Neva with a searching, hostile glance. "She's really almost beautiful."
And, in fact, never before was Neva so good looking. Vanity is an air plant not at all dependent upon roots in realities for nourishment and growth. Thus, she, born with rather less than the normal physical vanity, had been unaffected by the charms she could not but have seen had she looked at herself with vanity's sprightly optimism. Nor was there any encouragement in the atmosphere of old-fashioned Battle Field, where the best people were still steeped in medieval disdain of "foolishness" and regarded the modern passion for the joy of life as sinful. Also, she was without that aggressive instinct to please by physical charm which even circumvents the regulations of a chapter of cloistered nuns.
Until she came to New York, she had given her personal appearance no attention whatever, beyond instinctively trying to be as unobtrusive as possible; and even in New York her concessions to what she regarded as waste of time were really not concessions at all, were merely the result of exercising in the most indifferent fashion her natural good taste, in choosing the best from New York's infinite variety as she had chosen the best from Battle Field's meager and commonplace stocks of goods for women. The dress she was wearing that evening was not especially grand, seemed quakerishly high in the neck in comparison with Letty's; for Letty had a good back and was not one to conceal a charm which it was permissible to display. But Neva, in soft silver-gray; with her hair, bright, yet neither gold nor red, but all the shades between, framing her long oval face in a pompadour that merged gracefully into a simple knot at the back of her small head; with her regular features shown to that advantage which regular features have only when shoulders and neck are bared; and with her complexion cleared of all sallowness and restored to its natural smooth pallor by the healthful air and life of New York—Neva, thus recreated, was more than distinguished looking, was beautiful. "Who'd have thought it?" reflected Letty crossly. "What a difference clothes do make!" But Neva was slender—"thin, painfully thin," thought Mrs. Morris, with swiftly recovering spirits. She herself was plump and therefore thought "scrawniness" hideous, though often, to draw attention to her rounded charms, she wailed piteously that she was getting "disgracefully fat."
Neither of the men—her husband and Boris Raphael, the painter—shared her poor opinion of Neva after the first glance. Morris did not care for thin women, but he thought Neva had a certain beauty—not the kind he admired, but a kind, nevertheless. Boris studied the young woman with an expression that made Mrs. Joe redden with jealousy. "You think my cousin pretty?" said she to him, as they went down to dinner far enough ahead of Neva and Morris to be able to talk freely.
"More than that," replied Boris, "I think her unusual."
"If you ever chance to see her in ordinary dress, you'll change your mind, I'm sorry to say," said Letty softly. "Poor Neva! Hers is a sad case. She's one of the ought-to-bes-but-aren'ts."