"Courtlandt was right!" exclaimed Pauline ruefully, and with a stab of mortification. She turned to meet the inquiring look of Kindelon. "I thought Aunt Cynthia would be unpopular here," she continued. "I supposed that no one in my rooms to-night would care to seek her acquaintance."
"This is a grandee," said Kindelon, "and so they are glad enough to know her. If your cousin, Mr. Beekman, prophesied anything of that sort, he was indeed perfectly right."
Pauline shook her head musingly. "Good heavens!" she murmured, "are there any people in the world who can stand tests? I begin to think not." Her speech grew more animated, her eyes began to brighten indignantly and with an almost tearful light. "Here am I," she went on, "determined to encourage certain individuals in what I believed was their contempt of social frivolity and the void delusion which has been misnamed position and birth. With a sort of polite irony Aunt Cynthia appears and shows me that I am egregiously wrong—that she can hold her court here as well as at the most giddily fashionable assemblage.... Look; my cousin has just presented Mr. Whitcomb, the 'coming historian' with the pensive face, and Mr. Paiseley, the great American dramatist with the abnormal head. How pleased they both seem! They appear to tingle with deference. Aunt Cynthia is patronizing them, I am sure, as she now addresses them. She thinks them entirely her inferiors; she considers them out of her world, which is the correct world to be in, and there's an end of it. You can lay the Atlantic cable, you can build the Brooklyn Bridge, but you can't budge the granitic prejudices of Aunt Cynthia.... Yet why do they consent to be patronized by her? Do they not know and feel that she represents a mere sham? Do they value her for what she is, or misvalue her for something that she is not?"
Kindelon laughed a little gravely as he answered: "I am afraid they do the former. And in being what she is, she is a great deal."
"Surely not in the estimate of those who are at all serious on the subject of living—those whom superficialities in all conduct or thought weary and even disgust."
"But these," said Kindelon, with one of his hand-sweeps, "are not that sort of people."
"I supposed a great many of them were."
"You supposed wrongly."
Pauline gave a momentary frown, whose gloom meant pain. And before her face had re-brightened she had begun to speak. "But they cannot care to do as Aunt Cynthia does—to trifle, to idle."
"I fancy that a good many of them would trifle and idle if they had your aunt's facilities for that employment—or lack of it."