Money-mad! her thoughts ran on. The only test of honor—money, and ability and willingness to spend it. They must have money or they're nobodies. And if they have money, who cares where it came from? No one asks where the men get it—why should any one ask where the women get it?
XVI.
CHOICE AMONG EVILS.
A few days afterward—it was a Wednesday—Pauline came up to town early in the afternoon, as she had an appointment with the dressmaker and was going to the opera in the evening. At the dressmaker's, while she waited for a fitter to return from the workroom, she glanced at a newspaper spread upon the table so that its entire front page was in view. It was filled with an account of how the Woolens Monopoly had, in that bitter winter, advanced prices twenty to thirty-five per cent. all along the line. From the center of the page stared a picture of John Dumont—its expression peculiarly arrogant and sinister.
She read the head-lines only, then turned from the table. But on the drive up-town she stopped the carriage at the Savoy and sent the footman to the news-stand to get the paper. She read the article through—parts of it several times.
She had Langdon and Honoria Longview at dinner that night; by indirect questioning she drew him on to confirm the article, to describe how the Woolens Monopoly was "giving the country an old-fashioned winter." On the way to the opera she was ashamed of her ermine wrap enfolding her from the slightest sense of the icy air. She did not hear the singers, was hardly conscious of her surroundings. As they left the Metropolitan she threw back her wrap and sat with her neck bared to the intense cold.
"I say, don't do that!" protested Langdon.
She reluctantly drew the fur about her. But when she had dropped him and then Honoria and was driving on up the avenue alone, she bared her shoulders and arms again—"like a silly child," she said. But it gave her a certain satisfaction, for she felt like one who has a secret store of food in time of famine and feasts upon it. And she sat unprotected.
"Is Mr. Dumont in?" she asked the butler as he closed the door of their palace behind her.