I saw this. Yet I refrained from giving her the support she needed and all but asked. Her cry, “If I had some one to advise me,” meant, “If I had some one to give me the courage to act.” I knew what it meant. But eager though I was to be quit of her, I would not give her the thrust toward divorce that would have put into her the courage of anger and of the feeling that she was a martyr to my brutality. Why did I hold myself in check? Candidly, I do not know. I distrust the suggestion that it may have been due to essential goodness of heart. At any rate, I did restrain myself. She—naturally enough—misunderstood; and she proceeded to explain it to the gratifying of her vanity. I saw in her eyes, in her way of treating me, that she thought me her secret adorer, convinced of my unworthiness, of her god-to-mortal superiority; not daring openly to resist her desire to be free from me, but opposing it humbly, silently. I saw that she pitied me. Did this add to my anger? Not in the least. I have a perhaps queer sense of humor. I rather welcomed the chance to get a little amusement out of a situation otherwise dreary and infuriating.
Curiously enough, it was Armitage who came to her rescue—and to mine.
Bob had been in retirement several weeks, having himself rejuvenated by a beauty doctor. You are astonished, gentle reader, perhaps incredulous, that a man of his position—high both socially and financially—should stoop to such triviality—not a woman but a man. And the serious, masculine sort of man he was, I assure you. But you, being a confirmed accepter of the trash written and talked about human nature, do not appreciate what a power physical vanity is in the world. Of course, if you are a man, you know about your own carefully hid physical vanity. But you think it in yourself a virtue, quite natural, not a vanity at all. Bob Armitage was not vain enough to fail to see the beginning of the ravages of time and dissipation. Another man would have looked in the glass and would have seen a reflection ever handsomer as the years went by, would have discovered in the creases and crow’s-feet and lengthening wattles a superb beauty of manly strength of character showing at last in the face. Bob was not that sort of fool. He wished to fascinate the ladies; so, he strove to retain the fair insignia of youth as long as he possibly could. He knew as well as the next man that his wealth had value with the women far beyond any degree of beauty or charm. But like most men he wished to feel that he was at least not a “winner” in spite of his personal self; and his young good looks even helped toward the pleasantest of delusions—that he was loved for himself chiefly.
The beauty doctor did well by him, I must say. He looked ten years younger, would have passed in artificial light for a youth of thirty or thereabouts. He reappeared in his haunts, freshened up mentally, too; for physical content reacts powerfully upon the mind, and while it is true that feeling young helps one to look young, it is truer that looking young compels one to feel young.
With him came a Prince Frascatoni, head of one of the great families of Italy, one of the few that have retained German titles and estates from the days of the Holy Roman Empire. Frascatoni was sufficiently rich for all ordinary purposes, and could therefore pose as a traveler for pleasure with no matrimonial designs. He was, in fact, poor for a grand seigneur and was on the same business in America that has attracted here every other visiting foreigner of rank—except those who come for political purposes, and those who come to shoot in the West. And those classes give our fashionable society as wide a berth as they would its middle-class prototype in their home countries.
The first time I saw Frascatoni—when he and Armitage strolled into the reading room of the Federal Club together—I thought him about the handsomest and, in a certain way, the most distinguished-looking man I had ever seen. He was a black Italian—dark olive skin, coal-black hair, dark-gray eyes that seemed black or brown at a glance. They were weary-looking eyes; they gazed at you with the ineffable dreamy satiric repose of a sphinx who has seen the futile human procession march into the grave for countless centuries. He had a slow sweet smile, a manner made superior by the effacement of every trace of superiority. He had the quiet, leisurely voice of one used to being listened to attentively.
“Loring—the Prince Frascatoni. Prince, I particularly wish you to know my friend Godfrey Loring. Don’t be deceived by his look of the honest simple youth into thinking him either young or unsophisticated.”
The prince gave me his hand. As it had also been my habit ever since I learned the valuable trick merely to give my hand, the gesture was a draw. Neither had trapped the other into making an advance. We talked commonplaces of New York sky line, American energy and business enthusiasm for perhaps half an hour. Then we three and some one else, a professional cultivator of millionaires named Chassory, I believe, played bridge and afterwards dined together. It came out sometime during the evening that Frascatoni had met my wife in Rome and in Paris, and that he knew my son-in-law—not surprising, as the fashionable set is international, and is small enough to be acquainted all round.
Armitage must have told him that my wife and I were not altogether inconsolable if we did not see too much of each other. For, the prince, taking Edna in to dinner a few nights later, laid siege at once. I recall noting how he would talk to her in his quiet, leisurely way until she looked at him; then, how his weary eyes would suddenly light up with interest—not with ardor—nothing so banal as that—but a fleeting gleam of interest that was more flattering than the ardor of another man would have been. As Frascatoni, an unusual type, attracted me, I saved myself from boredom by observing him all evening. And it was highly instructive in the art of winning—whether women or men—to see how he led her on to try to make that fascinating fugitive gleam reappear in his eyes. I afterwards discovered that he accompanied the gleam with a peculiar veiled caress of inflection in his calm, even voice—a trick that doubly reënforced the flattery of the gleam.
“What a charming man Prince Frascatoni is,” said my wife, when our guests were gone.