“Ah, how life-like! That’s what I always feel when I see a Meissonier,” she was heard to exclaim, with her well-known instinct for the fitting epithet.
Lizzie Hazeldean stood motionless. Her eyes dazzled as if she had received a blow on the forehead. “So that’s what it feels like!” she thought. She lifted her head very high, looked about her again, tried to signal to Henry Prest, but saw him still engaged with the lovely Mrs. Lyman, and at the same moment caught the glance of young Hubert Wesson, Sabina’s eldest, who was standing in disengaged expectancy near the supper-room door.
Hubert Wesson, as his eyes met Mrs. Hazeldean’s, crimsoned to the forehead, hung back a moment, and then came forward, bowing low—again that too low bow! “So he saw me too,” she thought. She put her hand on his arm with a laugh. “Dear me, how ceremonious you are! Really, I’m not as old as that bow of yours implies. My dear boy, I hope you want to take me in to supper at once. I was out in the cold all the afternoon, gazing at the Fifth Avenue Hotel fire, and I’m simply dying of hunger and fatigue.”
There, the die was cast—she had said it loud enough for all the people nearest her to hear! And she was sure now that it was the right, the “natural” thing to do.
Her spirits rose, and she sailed into the supper-room like a goddess, steering Hubert to an unoccupied table in a flowery corner.
“No—I think we’re very well by ourselves, don’t you? Do you want that fat old bore of a Lucy Vanderlow to join us? If you do, of course ... I can see she’s dying to ... but then, I warn you, I shall ask a young man! Let me see—shall I ask Henry Prest? You see he’s hovering! No, it is jollier with just you and me, isn’t it?” She leaned forward a little, resting her chin on her clasped hands, her elbows on the table, in an attitude which the older women thought shockingly free, but the younger ones were beginning to imitate.
“And now, some champagne, please—and hot terrapin!... But I suppose you were at the fire yourself, weren’t you?” she leaned still a little nearer to say.
The blush again swept over young Wesson’s face, rose to his forehead, and turned the lobes of his large ears to balls of fire (“It looks,” she thought, “as if he had on huge coral earrings.”). But she forced him to look at her, laughed straight into his eyes, and went on: “Did you ever see a funnier sight than all those dressed-up absurdities rushing out into the cold? It looked like the end of an Inauguration Ball! I was so fascinated that I actually pushed my way into the hall. The firemen were furious, but they couldn’t stop me—nobody can stop me at a fire! You should have seen the ladies scuttling downstairs—the fat ones! Oh, but I beg your pardon; I’d forgotten that you admire ... avoirdupois. No? But ... Mrs. Van ... so stupid of me! Why, you’re actually blushing! I assure you, you’re as red as your mother’s fan—and visible from as great a distance! Yes, please; a little more champagne....”
And then the inevitable began. She forgot the fire, forgot her anxieties, forgot Mrs. Wesson’s affront, forgot everything but the amusement, the passing childish amusement, of twirling around her little finger this shy clumsy boy, as she had twirled so many others, old and young, not caring afterward if she ever saw them again, but so absorbed in the sport, and in her sense of knowing how to do it better than the other women—more quietly, more insidiously, without ogling, bridling or grimacing—that sometimes she used to ask herself with a shiver: “What was the gift given to me for?” Yes; it always amused her at first: the gradual dawn of attraction in eyes that had regarded her with indifference, the blood rising to the face, the way she could turn and twist the talk as though she had her victim on a leash, spinning him after her down winding paths of sentimentality, irony, caprice ... and leaving him, with beating heart and dazzled eyes, to visions of an all-promising morrow.... “My only accomplishment!” she murmured to herself as she rose from the table followed by young Wesson’s fascinated gaze, while already, on her own lips, she felt the taste of cinders.
“But at any rate,” she thought, “he’ll hold his tongue about having seen me at the fire.”