“How is your culture class?” I inquired, deliberately malicious, in my impatience and nervousness. “And do you still take conversation lessons?”
She was furiously annoyed. “Oh, those old jokes of Joe's,” she said, affecting disdainful amusement.
In fact, they were anything but jokes. On Mondays and Thursdays she used to attend a class for women who, like herself, wished to be “up-to-date on culture and all that sort of thing.” They hired a teacher to cram them with odds and ends about art and politics and the “latest literature, heavy and light.” On Tuesdays and Fridays she had an “indigent gentlewoman,” whatever that may be, come to her to teach her how to converse and otherwise conduct herself according to the “standards of polite society.”
Joe used to give imitations of those conversation lessons that raised roars of laughter round the poker table, the louder because so many of the other men had wives with the same ambitions and the same methods of attaining them.
Mrs. Ball came back to the subject of Anita.
“I am glad you are going to settle with such a charming girl. She comes of such a charming family. I have never happened to meet any of them. We are in the West Side set, you know, while they move in the East Side set, and New York is so large that one almost never meets any one outside one's own set.” This smooth snobbishness, said in the affected “society” tone, was as out of place in her as rouge and hair-dye in a wholesome, honest old grandmother.
I began to pace the floor. “Can it be,” I fretted aloud, “that Joe's racing round looking for an Episcopalian preacher, when there was a Methodist at hand?”
“I'm sure he wouldn't bring anything but a Church of England priest,” Mrs. Ball assured me loftily. “Why, Miss Ellersly wouldn't think she was married, if she hadn't a priest of her own church.”
My temper got the bit in its teeth. I stopped before her, and fixed her with an eye that must have had some fire in it. “I'm not marrying a fool, Mrs. Ball,” said I. “You mustn't judge her by her bringing-up—by her family. Children have a way of bringing themselves up, in spite of damn fool parents.”
She weakened so promptly that I was ashamed of myself. My only apology for getting out of patience with her is that I had seen her seldom in the last few years, had forgotten how matter-of-surface her affectation and snobbery were, and how little they interfered with her being a good mother and a good wife, up to the limits of her brain capacity.