But once in Mrs. Hazeldean’s box I was only an overgrown boy again, bathed in such blushes as used, at the same age, to visit Hubert, forgetting that I had a moustache to twirl, and knocking my hat from the peg on which I had just hung it, in my zeal to pick up a programme she had not dropped.
For she was really too lovely—too formidably lovely. I was used by now to mere unadjectived loveliness, the kind that youth and spirits hang like a rosy veil over commonplace features, an average outline and a pointless merriment. But this was something calculated, accomplished, finished—and just a little worn. It frightened me with my first glimpse of the infinity of beauty and the multiplicity of her pit-falls. What! There were women who need not fear crow’s-feet, were more beautiful for being pale, could let a silver hair or two show among the dark, and their eyes brood inwardly while they smiled and, chatted? But then no young man was safe for a moment! But then the world I had hitherto known had been only a warm pink nursery, while this new one was a place of darkness, perils and enchantments....
It was the next day that one of my sisters asked me where I had been the evening before, and that I puffed out my chest to answer: “With Mrs. Hazeldean—at the opera.” My mother looked up, but did not speak till the governess had swept the girls off; then she said with pinched lips: “Hubert Wesson took you to Mrs. Hazeldean’s box?”
“Yes.”
“Well, a young man may go where he pleases. I hear Hubert is still infatuated; it serves Sabina right for not letting him marry the youngest Lyman girl. But don’t mention Mrs. Hazeldean again before your sisters.... They say her husband never knew—I suppose if he had she would never have got old Miss Cecilia Winter’s money.” And it was then that my mother pronounced the name of Henry Prest, and added that phrase about the Fifth Avenue Hotel which suddenly woke my boyish memories....
In a flash I saw again, under its quickly-lowered veil, the face with the exposed eyes and the frozen smile, and felt through my grown-up waistcoat the stab to my boy’s heart and the loosened murmur of my soul; felt all this, and at the same moment tried to relate that former face, so fresh and clear despite its anguish, to the smiling guarded countenance of Hubert’s “jolliest woman I know.”
I was familiar with Hubert’s indiscriminate use of his one adjective, and had not expected to find Mrs. Hazeldean “jolly” in the literal sense: in the case of the lady he happened to be in love with the epithet simply meant that she justified his choice. Nevertheless, as I compared Mrs. Hazeldean’s earlier face to this one, I had my first sense of what may befall in the long years between youth and maturity, and of how short a distance I had travelled on that mysterious journey. If only she would take me by the hand!
I was not wholly unprepared for my mother’s comment. There was no other lady in Mrs. Hazeldean’s box when we entered; none joined her during the evening, and our hostess offered no apology for her isolation. In the New York of my youth every one knew what to think of a woman who was seen “alone at the opera”; if Mrs. Hazeldean was not openly classed with Fanny Ring, our one conspicuous “professional,” it was because, out of respect for her social origin, New York preferred to avoid such juxtapositions. Young as I was, I knew this social law, and had guessed, before the evening was over, that Mrs. Hazeldean was not a lady on whom other ladies called, though she was not, on the other hand, a lady whom it was forbidden to mention to other ladies. So I did mention her, with bravado.
No ladies showed themselves at the opera with Mrs. Hazeldean; but one or two dropped in to the jolly supper announced by Hubert, an entertainment whose jollity consisted in a good deal of harmless banter over broiled canvas-backs and celery, with the best of champagne. These same ladies I sometimes met at her house afterward. They were mostly younger than their hostess, and still, though precariously, within the social pale: pretty trivial creatures, bored with a monotonous prosperity, and yearning for such unlawful joys as cigarettes, plain speaking, and a drive home in the small hours with the young man of the moment. But such daring spirits were few in old New York, their appearances infrequent and somewhat furtive. Mrs. Hazeldean’s society consisted mainly of men, men of all ages, from her bald or grey-headed contemporaries to youths of Hubert’s accomplished years and raw novices of mine.
A great dignity and decency prevailed in her little circle. It was not the oppressive respectability which weighs on the reformed déclassée, but the air of ease imparted by a woman of distinction who has wearied of society and closed her doors to all save her intimates. One always felt, at Lizzie Hazeldean’s, that the next moment one’s grandmother and aunts might be announced; and yet so pleasantly certain that they wouldn’t be.