"You are looking very well," she said to Pauline, as they sat on a yielding cachemire lounge together, in the little daintily-decked lower reception-room. "And, my dear niece," she continued, "you must let me tell you that I am full of congratulations at your not being made ill by what happened here the other evening. Sallie and I felt for you deeply. It was so apparent to us that you would never have done it if you had known how dreadfully it would turn out.... But there is no use of raking up old by-gones. You have seen the folly of the whole thing, of course. My dear, it has naturally got abroad. The Hackensacks know it, and the Tremaines, and those irrepressible gossips, the Desbrosses girls. But Sallie and I have silenced all stupid scandals as best we could, and merely represented the affair as a capricious little pleasantry on your part. You haven't lost caste a particle by it—don't fancy that you have. You were a Van Corlear, and you're now Mrs. Varick, with a great fortune; and such a whim is to be pardoned accordingly."
Pauline was biting her lips, now. "I don't want it to be pardoned, Aunt Cynthia," she said, "and I don't hold it either as a capricious pleasantry or a whim. It was very serious with me. I told you that before."
"Truly you did, my dear," said Mrs. Poughkeepsie. She laughed a mellow laugh of amusement, and laid one gloved hand upon Pauline's arm. "But you saw those horrible people in your drawing-rooms, and I am sure that this must have satisfied you that the whole project was impossible ... en l'air, my dear, as it unquestionably was. Why, I assure you that Sallie and I laughed together for a whole hour after we got home. They were nearly all such droll creatures! It was like a fancy-ball without the mask, you know. Upon my word, I enjoyed it after a fashion, Pauline; so did Sallie. One woman always addressed me as 'ma'am.' Another asked me if I 'resided on the Fifth Avenue.' Still another ... (no, by the way, that wasn't a woman; it was a man) ... inquired of Sallie whether she danced the Lancers much in fashionable circles.... Oh, how funny it all was! And they didn't talk of books in the least. I supposed that we were to be pelted with quotations from living and dead authors, and asked all kinds of radical questions as to what we had read. But they simply talked to us of the most ordinary matters, and in a very extraordinary way.... However, let us not concern ourselves with them any more, my dear. They were horrid, and you know they were horrid, and it goes without saying that you will have no more to do with them."
"I thought some of them horrid," said Pauline, with an ambiguous coolness, "though perhaps I found them so in a different way from yourself."
Mrs. Poughkeepsie repeated her mellow laugh, and majestically nodded once or twice as she did so.
"Well, well, my dear," she recommenced, "let us dismiss them and forget them.... I hope you are going out again. You have only to signify a wish, you know. There will not be the slightest feeling in society—not the slightest."
"Really?" said Pauline, with an involuntary sarcasm which she could not repress.
But her aunt received the sarcasm in impervious good faith. "Oh, not the slightest feeling," she repeated. "And I do hope, Pauline," she went on, with a certain distinct yet unexplained alteration of manner, "that you will make your rentrée, as it were, at a little dinner I shall give Sallie next Thursday. It celebrates an event." Here Mrs. Poughkeepsie paused and looked full at her niece. "I mean Sallie's engagement."
"Sallie's engagement?" quickly murmured Pauline. The latter word had carried an instant personal force of reminder.
"Yes—to Lord Glenartney. You met him once or twice, I believe."