Mr. Prawle had raised himself to his full height. "I refuse your assistance!" he ejaculated. "You offer it as you would offer it to a pensioner—a beggar! And you—you, have assumed the right of entertaining and fostering literary talent! I scarcely addressed you at your last reception ... I waited. I supposed that in spite of Kindelon's known enmity, some of your guests must have told you how immense were my deserts—how they transcended the morbid horrors of Rufus Corson, and the glaring superficialities of Arthur Trevor. But I discover, plainly enough, that you are impervious to all intellectual greatness of claim. I will accept no aid from you!—none whatever! But one day, when the name of Leander Prawle is a shining and a regnant one, you will perhaps remember how miserably you failed to value his merits, and shrink with shame at the thought of your own pitiable misjudgment!..."
"Thank Heaven that monstrosity of literary vanity has removed itself!" thought Pauline, a little later, when Leander Prawle had been heard very decisively to close the outer hall-door. "And now I must dwell no longer on trifles—I must concern myself with far weightier matters."
The coming marriage to Kindelon on the morrow seemed to her fraught with untold incentive for reflection. "But I will not reflect," she soon determined. "I will at once try to see Mrs. Dares, and let her reflect for me. She is so wise, so capable, so admirable! I have consented because I love! Let her, if she shall so decide, dissuade me because of experiences weightier than even my own past bitter ones!"
The hour of her resolved visit to Mrs. Dares had now arrived. In a certain way she congratulated herself upon the distracting tendency of both Mr. Barrowe's and Mr. Prawle's visits. "They have prevented me," she mused, "from dwelling too much upon my own unhappy situation. Mr. Barrowe is a very sensible fool, and Mr. Prawle is a very foolish fool. They are both, in their way, taunting and satiric radiations from the dying bonfire of my own rash ambition. They are both reminders to me that I, after all, am the greatest and most conspicuous fool. Some other woman, more sensible and clever than I, will perhaps seek to establish in New York a social movement where intellect and education are held above the last Anglomaniac coaching-drive to Central Park, or the last vulgarly-select cotillon at Delmonico's. But it will be decades hence. I don't know how many ... but it will be decades.... All is over, now. I face a new life; I have ended with my salon. Only one result has come of it—Ralph Kindelon. Thank Heaven, he is a substantial result, though all the rest are shadow and illusion!"
Pauline soon afterwards started on foot for the residence of Mrs. Dares. It was nearly dusk. She had determined to set before this good and trusted woman every detail of her present discomfort, and while confessing her matrimonial promise as regarded the marriage with Kindelon on the morrow, to exhort counsel, advice, guidance, justification. Being a woman, and having made up her mind, justification may have been the chief stimulus of her devout pilgrimage.
The great bustling city was in shadow as she rang the bell at Mrs. Dares's residence.
A strange, ominous, miserable fear was upon her while she did so. She could not account for it; she strove to shake it off. She remembered her own reflections: "All is over now. I face a new life."
But she could not dismiss the brooding dread while she waited the answer of her summons at Mrs. Dares's door.