And so on and on, Beatrice letting her mother rave herself into a fitting state of mind for a struggle with her husband. Whenever she paused Beatrice brought up the dressmaking to set her off again. And when she was about to leave Beatrice called in Valentine and presented her as “My partner, Miss Clermont.” Mrs. Richmond was quite done for. Her daughter’s maid treated as an equal—and become her daughter’s business partner! “I’ll telephone you to-night—or see you to-morrow,” said she as she was leaving. She did not dare offend Beatrice by ignoring “Miss Clermont.” So she made a bow that was a highly amusing specimen of those always amusing compromises which no sentient thing in the universe but the humorless human animal would attempt to carry off.
XVIII
MRS. RICHMOND REBELS
For some time after her mother left Beatrice sat in a brown study, her ex-maid and partner seated across the table from her and not venturing to interrupt. At last, Beatrice said: “I don’t understand it at all. I’d never have believed mother would take it that way.”
“You could hardly expect her to be pleased, Miss Richmond,” replied Valentine.
“Oh, I knew she’d blow up and sail into me,” said Beatrice. “I’m puzzling over the way she acted about father. I never before knew her to revolt against him.”
“Probably—when Mrs. Richmond sees him—” was Miss Clermont’s highly suggestive, unfinished comment.
“No doubt,” said Beatrice. “And yet—Mamma was mad through and through—fighting mad. I never saw her like that—with him. I shouldn’t have believed it was in her. I suspect—I hope—she’ll make trouble.”
Beatrice was right in her diagnosis of her mother’s rage. Mrs. Richmond was indeed fighting mad. Everything that lives, even a human being weakened by luxury and by long and meek servitude, has its limit of endurance, its point at which it will cease to run or to cower and will fight to the last gasp. That limit, that point had been reached by Mrs. Richmond. There were many things she liked in varying degrees—her children, society novels, half a dozen friends, her maid Marthe, an occasional man—the Count d’Artois just at that time. There were three things only to which she was deeply attached—three besides herself. The first was her youthful appearance, which she struggled so assiduously to retain. The second was wealth, which gave her so many delightful moral, mental and physical sensations. The third and dearest was social position. The mania of social position habitually seizes upon persons of great affluence and small intelligence; it manifests itself early, often in a grave form: but it does not become virulent until middle life. With Mrs. Richmond the mania was aggravated by her not having been born to fashionable society. Patiently, resolutely, toilsomely she had built herself up socially year by year. She had endured humiliations, snubs, insults, as a gallant soldier endures the blows and buffetings of battle. And her virtue had been rewarded. She had attained social position—not, indeed, security, for in America social security is impossible; but an envied rank among the very first, reasonably assured so long as Richmond retained his wealth and no degrading scandal undermined and toppled. Like the prudent soul that she was, she remained sleeplessly vigilant lest some such scandal should come from an unexpected quarter.
There were obscure relations—vulgar—no, worse—positively low. True, everybody was cursed with such; but to Mrs. Richmond her own and her husband’s impossible kin seemed more awful than anyone else’s. Then, Richmond, industrious social climber though he was and as careful about matters of social position as any of the other big men of finance who graciously permitted their families to be fashionable—Richmond occasionally broke loose and offended by coarse and greedy snatching at wealth owned by persons of social power. Also, he occasionally almost overreached himself in his contempt for law and public opinion, and put in jeopardy his reputation. But this danger was not now haunting her as it once had. Through the constant infractions of Richmond and his like the moral code was no longer what it used to be, was a mere collection of old tatters. Pretty much everybody who socially was anybody despised it in private and professed public respect for it only out of habit and for the benefit of the lower classes.
Finally, there were the children. One could never tell what one’s children would grow up into. Of the four, she had regarded the younger daughter as the safest because she was intensely proud, fond of social position, of fashionable luxury—fonder of them than of anything—except, perhaps, of having her own way where opposed. Yes, Beatrice would never cause her social anxiety. In the irony of fate it was she and only she who had become troublesome. The refusal to marry Peter Vanderkief was bad. The infatuation for an artist, eminent though he seemed to be—at least, in France—was worse. This dressmaking was worst. To Mrs. Richmond’s excited fancy it seemed to foreshadow social downfall—not from the fashionable set, but from leadership in it. If there had been so much as a single previous generation of fashionable Richmonds, or if their own fashion were a matter of twenty years instead of a scant ten, the thing wouldn’t matter. Beatrice would be regarded as eccentric—and eccentricity is a mark of aristocratic blood. But, in the circumstances, for Beatrice to become a dressmaker in partnership with a French maid and a chauffeur——