"Why, you don't tell me so!" blithely exclaimed Mrs. Diggs. "I dote on Beverley. I suppose he thinks me dreadful, but I dote on him, just the same. He is so broad, don't you know? He's seen so much, and read so much, and lived so much, generally. And with it all he's so conventional. That is the way I like conventionality—when you find it in some one who makes it a sort of fatigue-dress for liberal views, and not the uniform of narrow ones."
"I approve your description of Mr. Thurston," said Claire, slowly. "It tells me how well you know him."
Mrs. Diggs creased her forehead in puzzled style, and bent her face closer toward Claire's. "What on earth do you suppose it was that made him dart off so suddenly to Europe?" she asked.
Claire stooped, as though to discover some kind of objectionable speck in the cup of chocolate that she was stirring, and then removed what she had found, with much apparent care. "He did go quite unexpectedly, did he not?" she said, lowering her head still more as she put the speck on her saucer and examined it with an excellent counterfeit of the way we regard such things when uncertain if their origin be animal or vegetable. She wondered to herself, at the same time, whether Mrs. Diggs would notice her increased color, or whether she herself had merely imagined that her color had undergone any sort of change. "At some other time," she went on, letting the words loiter in utterance, with a very neat simulation of preoccupied attention ... "at some other time, Mrs. Diggs, I should like to talk more with you about Mrs. Van Horn's brother. But just now I want to ask you about Mrs. Van Horn herself."
Here Claire briskly raised her head. The problem of the aggressive speck had seemingly been solved. "I have heard Mr. Thurston mention that he had a sister of that name," she continued, now speaking with speed, "but he told me almost nothing regarding her. She appears to be a very important person."
Mrs. Diggs glanced toward a distant table at which she had already seen her cousin seat herself. Then she turned to Claire again, as though confident of how safely remote was the lady whom she at once proceeded to discuss.
"Cornelia is a very important person, Mrs. Hollister. As I told you, she's my second cousin. I used to see a good deal of her before I was married. She's at least ten years older than I am. She brought me out into society. I was an orphan, don't you know, and there was nobody else to bring me out. I had to be brought out, for I was eighteen, and all the rest of the family were either in mourning, or were too old, or else had gone to Europe, or ... well, something of that sort. So Cornelia gave me a great ball. It was splendidly civil of her. But I don't think she did it from the least benevolence. No, not at all. She had ended her term of widowhood, and wanted to appear again, don't you know? The ball was magnificent, and it gathered all her old clientèle about her. I remember it so well; it is only eight years ago. I stood at her side, behind a towering burden of bouquets which it made my wrist ache to hold. Cornelia was in white satin, with knots of violets all over her dress. I shall never forget that dress. She wore amethysts round her throat, and in her hair, and on her arms. It was a kind of jubilant second-mourning, don't you know? She looked superb; she was eight years younger than she is now. People gathered about her and paid their court. She resumed old acquaintances; she received open or whispered compliments; she was the event of the evening. I was nearly ignored. And yet it was my ball; it had been given for me, to celebrate my début in society. But as the evening progressed I began to discover that I had been made a mere pretext. Cornelia herself was the real reason of the ball. She had simply used me as an excuse for reëmerging. She reëmerged, by the way, with seventy thousand a year, and a reputation for having been one of the reigning belles of New York before she married Winthrop Van Horn. She was poor when she married Winthrop, and he lived only a few years afterward. He left her every penny of his money; there were no children. Cornelia was a devoted wife; at least, I never heard it contradicted, and I've somehow always accepted it. I think everybody has always accepted it, too. He died of consumption in Bermuda, and it is usually taken for granted, don't you know, that he died in Cornelia's arms. For my part, I can't imagine anybody dying in Cornelia's arms.... But that's neither here nor there. She kept herself as quiet as a mouse for five years. But mice are nomadic, and they gnaw everything. And Cornelia, during those five years of bereaved woe, to my certain knowledge, took a peep at every capital in Europe. After the ball—the ball that she gave me, please understand—she became a great leader. She's a great leader still. Didn't Beverley tell you that, Mrs. Hollister?"
"No," stated Claire, keenly interested by this nimble monologue. "As I said, Mr. Thurston scarcely did more than mention his sister's name."
Mrs. Diggs applied herself actively to a fragment of cold chicken, which she had left neglected through all these elucidating items. Claire watched her, thinking how clever she was and yet how uncircumspect. With what slight incentive had been roused this actual whirlwind of family confidences!
"She perfectly adores Beverley," Mrs. Diggs presently continued. "I have an idea that she does so because he's a Thurston—or rather because she's one. She has contrived to make it appear very exceptional to be a Thurston. The Thurstons have never been anything whatever. Her mother married into the family, and cast a spell of aristocracy over them. But Cornelia never alludes to the Van Kortlandt connection. She knows that can take care of itself. I believe her grandfather, on the other side, was a saddler. But she has managed to have it seriously disputed whether he was a saddler or a landed Knickerbocker grandee. The panels of her carriage bear a Thurston crest. It is a very pretty one; I am quite sure she invented it. I once told Beverley so, and he laughed. He has never used it, though he has never denounced it as spurious. The joke is that she ignores the Van Horn crest entirely, which is the only one she has any right to air. Cornelia is a great leader, as I said. She has Thursday evenings in the big old house on Washington Square which her late husband left her. Lots of people have struggled to go to Cornelia's Thursdays, and not gone, after all. It's absolutely funny to observe what a vogue she has got. She could make anybody whom she chose to take up a social somebody by merely lifting her finger. But she never lifts her finger. That is why she is so run after. You can't get her to use the power she possesses. It yearly grows more of a power, don't you know, on this very account. It's like a big deposit in a bank, that gets bigger through lying there untouched. She won't spend a penny; she lets it grow. The women of New York are becoming a good deal less flippant, some of them, than they used to be. Clubs and receptions have come into fashion, where intellectual matters are seriously, even capably discussed. Somebody will read a paper on something sensible and literary, and a little debate will follow. At one of these clubs—composed strictly of women—it is forbidden to mention the last ball, though this may have occurred on the preceding night and everybody may have seen everybody else there, talking the usual gay nonsense. The whole thing is a kind of 'movement,' don't you know? It's very picturesque and it's extremely in earnest. It makes one think a little of the old historical French salons. It has laid bare some charming and surprising discoveries. It has shown how many women have been reading and thinking in secret, during those long intervals of leisure that have occurred between their opportunities for being publicly silly, inane, flirtatious, and hence of correct form. On the other hand it has led certain women to cultivate their minds as they would a new style of dressing their hair. All that we used to satirize in former entertainments of this kind fails to exist in those I am describing. Pipe-stem curls and blue spectacles are replaced by the most Parisian felicities of costume. A delightful-looking creature in a Worth dress that fits her like a glove will give us her 'views' on the Irish land-question or the persecution of the Jews in Russia.... And now I come to the real object of my digression, as the long-winded orators say. Cornelia Van Horn frowns upon all this. She has gathered about her a little faction, too, which frowns obediently in her defense. You must not fancy for a moment that Cornelia could not shine in these assemblies if she chose to favor them. She has brains enough to outshine nearly all their supporters. But she condemns the intellectual tendency in women when thus openly exhibited. If they want to read and think, they should do it in the quiet of their closets, and in the same way that they write their letters, or glance over their accounts, or distribute their household orders. There is no objection to philosophy, science, belles-lettres, so long as these are not made to interfere with the general dignified commonplace of the higher social life. To be individual, argumentative, reformatory, is to be professional. To be professional is not to be 'good form.' The moment that a drawing-room is made to resemble a lecture-room or a seminary it becomes odious from a patrician stand-point. Only queens and duchesses can afford to paint pictures or to write books, without loss of caste. A consistent aristocracy never discovers new ideas; it accepts old ones. Agitators are the enemies of repose, and repose is the soul of refinement."