There had been one occasion when she had actually forgotten to think of herself and of the effect she might be producing, and had joined with real interest in a discussion about books with a man a great deal older than herself, who happened to be placed next to her at a big dinner party. Lady Isabel, opposite, had glanced once or twice at her daughter's unusually animated expression.
"You seemed to be gettin' on very well with the man on your other side—not the one who took you down, but the oldish one," she said afterwards in a pleased voice.
"I never found out his name," said Alex. "He told me he wrote books. It was so interesting; we were talking about poetry a lot of the time."
Her mother's face lost something of its smile. "Oh, my darling!" she exclaimed in sudden flattened tones, "don't go and get a reputation for being clever, whatever you do. People do dislike that sort of thing so much in a girl!"
Alex, her solitary triumph killed, knew that there was yet another item to be added to that invisible score of reasons for which one was loved or disliked by one's fellow-creatures.
Without formulating the conviction to herself, she believed implicitly that in the careful simulation of those attributes which she had been told would provoke admiration or affection, lay her only chance of obtaining something of that which she craved.
Dismayed, wearied, and uncheered by success, she continued to act out her little feeble comedies.
At the end of her second season she felt very old, and very much disillusioned. This was not real life as she had thought to find it on leaving schooldays behind her.
There must be something beyond—some happy reality that should reveal the wherefore of all existence, but Alex knew not where to find it.
Morbidity was a word which had no place in the vocabulary of her surroundings, but Lady Isabel said to her rather plaintively, "You must try and look more cheerful, Alex, dear, when I take you about. Your father is quite vexed when he sees such a gloomy face. You enjoy things, don't you?"