Mrs. Van Reinberg's eyes shone straight into mine. Her face expressed the most unmitigated contempt.
"Social triumphs!" she repeated scornfully. "What clap-trap! I tell you that a season in London or Paris, much more Vienna, is enough to drive a real American woman crazy. Success, indeed! What does it amount to?"
She paused for a moment to take breath. I realized then that the woman whom I had known was something of a fraud, a puppet hung out with the rags of a European manner, according to the study and observation of the shrewd, little lady who pulled the strings. It was Mrs. Van Reinberg of London and Paris whom I had met upon the steamer; it was Mrs. Van Reinberg of New York who was talking to me now, and she was speaking in her own language.
"Look here, Mr. Courage," she said, leaning towards me with her elbows upon her knees, and nothing left of that elegant pose which she had at first assumed. "I suppose I've got my full share of the American spirit, and I tell you I'm a bad hand at taking a back seat anywhere, or even a front one on sufferance. And yet, wherever we go in Europe, that's what we've got to put up with! You think we're mad on titles over here! We aren't, but we are keen on what a title brings over your side. Take your Debrett—there are I don't know how many baronets and lords and marquises and earls, and all the rest of it. Do you realize that whatever public place I'm in, or even at a friend's dinner-party, the homely, stupid wives of those men have got to go in before me, and if they don't—why I know all the time it's a matter of courtesy? That's what makes me mad! Don't you dare to smile at me now. I'm in deadly earnest. In this country, so far as society goes, I'm at the top. You may say it doesn't amount to much, and you're right. But it makes it all the worse when I'm in Europe, and see the sort of women I have to give place to. Say, don't you sit there, Mr. Courage, and look at me as though I were a woman with some cranky grievance to talk about. It's got beyond that, let me tell you!"
"I can assure you, Mrs. Van Reinberg—" I began.
"Now listen here, Mr. Courage," she interrupted. "I'm not the sort of woman to complain at what I don't try to alter. What's the good of having a husband whose nod is supposed to shake the money markets of the world, if you don't make use of him?"
I nodded sagely.
"You are quite right," I said. "Money, after all, is the greatest power in the world to-day. Money will buy anything!"
"I guess so, if it's properly spent," Mrs. Van Reinberg agreed. "Only very few of my country-people have any idea how to use it to get what they want. They go over the other side and hire great houses, and bribe your great ladies to call themselves their friends, and bribe your young men with wonderful entertainments to come to their houses. They spend, spend, spend, and think they are getting value for their money. Idiots! The great lady whom they are proud to entertain one night is as likely as not to cut them the next. Half the people who go to their parties go out of curiosity, and half to meet their own friends. Not one to see them! Not one because it does them the slightest good to be seen there. They are there in the midst of it all, and that is all you can say. Their motto should be 'on sufferance.' That's what I call going to work the wrong way."
"You have," I suggested, "some other scheme?"