"Tut, tut," she remonstrated. "Don't be too confident. Ambition may overleap itself. Remember that you are still on the threshold."
"I've crossed it," said Claire, laughing. "I've got into the drawing-room."
"No, you haven't, my dear. You have yet achieved nothing secure, absolute, decisive. Now, I'm not a bit of a snob, myself, as you know. But I understand how to reason like one; I can measure the mettle of the foe you've got to fight with. Let us talk plainly together, as we always do. None of the very heavy swells have as yet admitted you. There's no use of denying this. You're being a great deal talked about. You've broken bread already, and you've received invitations to break more bread, with some very nice, exclusive women. But they are not of the first rank; they're not of the great, proud, select clique. True, Cornelia has called on you, and Sylvia Lee has called. You've returned their visits, and have seen neither; neither was at home. But then neither is at home except on her visiting-day, and that is customarily written with much legibility on both their cards. But on both the cards which you received, no day at all was written. I've never mentioned this before, have I? Well, it never occurred to me until last night. I was nervous, and couldn't sleep; that dear Manhattan was out at the club, smoking those horrid cigars, which flush his face so and hurt his poor, dear brain, I'm sure. Perhaps it was that which kept me awake and made my mind wander toward you, and reflect upon this peculiarly interesting stage of your career. The little circumstance I have mentioned may mean nothing, but I'm inclined to think otherwise; everything, no matter how trivial, about Cornelia, is sure to mean something. But, however this may be, affairs have now reached a peculiar pass with you. You must make a coup, my dear—a grand coup."
"Which you have arranged entirely," said Claire, smiling, "I haven't a doubt. And now you await my sanction of it?"
Mrs. Diggs creased her pale forehead, in a reflective frown. "No, not precisely that, my dear; I haven't yet quite decided what it is to be. But I have almost decided. Suppose that you do not make it at all—that is, not in your own person. Suppose that I make it for you."
"You?" inquired Claire.
"Yes. Suppose that I send out cards for a huge reception, and place your card within the same envelope. Then you would receive at my side, don't you know, and everybody who came must henceforth be on your list as well as on mine. I would launch you boldly forth, in other words. I would put you under my wing. I would give you my cachet."
A marked intimacy now existed between Claire and Goldwin. He would often drop in of an evening—sometimes of an afternoon. Hollister was not by any means at home every evening, when he and Claire had no mutual engagement. He was getting to have a good many solitary engagements. "Stag" dinners claimed him; there would be nocturnal trysts with certain fellow-financiers on the subject of the morrow's chances. Then, too, he had been made a member of the Metropolitan Club, an institution oddly hard, and in a way oddly easy, to enter; it was the one great reigning club of the continent; none other precisely resembled it; the social leaders who did not belong to it were few, and to cross its doorstep at will was the unfulfilled dream of many a social struggler.
Claire cordially liked Goldwin. If he had been obscure she would still have liked him, though his importance was so knit in with his personality, he exhaled such an atmosphere of pecuniary and patrician celebrity, that one could ill think of him as ever being or ever having been obscure. She was boldly frank with him regarding her ambitious aims. He would throw back his handsome head and laugh most heartily at her ingenuous confidences. He would tell her that she was the most exquisite joke in the world, and yet that he was somehow forced to accept her as quite the opposite of one. "Ah, yes, intensely opposite," he would add, with a fluttered pull at his silken mustache that she felt to be studied in its emotional suggestiveness, with a large sigh that she suspected of being less studied, and with a look in his charming hazel eyes that would nearly always make her avert her own. His homage had become a very substantial fact, and she knew just how much of it the popular standard of wifely discretion would permit her to receive—just how much of it would be her advantage and not her detriment. He was too keen not to have perceived that she had drawn this judicious line of calculation. Now and then he made little semi-jocose attempts to overleap it, but at the worst a word could curb him where a glance failed. She found him, all in all, saltatory but never vicious; a stout pull of the rein always brought him to terms.
After her converse with Mrs. Diggs, just recorded, she told him of the latter's proposed coup. He looked at her sharply for a moment, and then made a very wry grimace.