Mrs. Minity had come to the Riviera thirty years before, after an attack of bronchitis, and finding the climate milder and the life easier than in Brooklyn, had not gone back. Mrs. Clephane never knew what roots she had broken in the upheaval, for everything immediately surrounding her assumed such colossal proportions that remoter facts, even concerning herself, soon faded to the vanishing-point. Only now and then, when a niece from Bridgeport sent her a bottle of brandy-peaches, or a nephew from Brooklyn wrote to say that her income had been reduced by the foreclosure of a mortgage, did the family emerge from its transatlantic mists, and Mrs. Minity become, for a moment, gratified or irate at the intrusion. But such emotions, at their acutest, were but faint shadows of those aroused by the absence of her foot-warmer, or the Salvation Army’s having called twice in the same month for her subscription, or one of the horses having a stiff shoulder, and being replaced, for a long hazardous week, by another, known to the same stable for twenty years, and whom the patron himself undertook to drive, so that Mrs. Minity should not miss her airing. She had thought of staying in till her own horse recovered; but the doctor had absolutely forbidden it, so she had taken her courage in both hands, and gone out with the substitute, who was not even of the same colour as the horse she was used to. “But I took valerian every night,” she added, “and doubled my digitalis.”
Kate Clephane, as she listened (for the hundredth time), remembered that she had once thought Mrs. Minity a rather impressive old lady, somewhat arrogant and very prosy, but with a distinct “atmosphere,” and a charming half-obsolete vocabulary, suggesting “Signers” and Colonial generals, which was a refreshing change from the over-refinement of Mrs. Merriman and the Betterlys’ monotonous slang. Now, compared to certain long-vanished figures of the Clephane background—compared even to the hated figure of old Mrs. Clephane—Mrs. Minity shrank to the semblance of a vulgar fussy old woman.
“Old Mrs. Clephane never bragged, whatever she did,” Kate thought: “how ridiculous all that fuss about driving behind a strange horse would have seemed to her. After all, good breeding, even in the odious, implies a certain courage....” Her mother-in-law, as she mused, assumed the commanding yet not unamiable shape of a Roman matron of heroic mould, a kind of “It-hurts-not-O-my-Pætus,” falling first upon the sword.
The bridge-players in Countess Lanska’s pastille-scented and smoke-blurred drawing-room seemed to have undergone the same change as Mrs. Minity. The very room, as Kate entered, on fire from the wind, seemed stuffier, untidier and, yes—vulgarer—than she had remembered. The empty glasses with drowned lemon-peel, the perpetually unemptied ash-trays, the sketches by the Countess’s latest protégé—splashy flower markets, rococo churches, white balustrades, umbrella-pines and cobalt seas—the musical instruments tossed about on threadbare cashmere shawls covering still more threadbare sofas, even the heart-rending gaze of the outspread white bear with the torn-off ear which, ever since Kate had known him, had clung to his flattened head by the same greasy thread: all this disorder was now, for the first time, reflected in the faces about the card-tables. Not one of them, men or women, if asked where they had come from, where they were going, or why they had done such and such things, or refrained from doing such other, would have answered truthfully; not, as Kate knew, from any particular, or at any rate permanent, need of concealment, but because they lived in a chronic state of mental inaccuracy, excitement and inertia, which made it vaguely exhilarating to lie and definitely fatiguing to be truthful.
She had not meant to stay long, for her first glance at their new faces told her that to them also she would not be able to speak of what had happened. But, to subdue her own agitation and divert their heavy eyes, the easiest thing was to take her usual hand at bridge; and once she had dropped into her place, the familiar murmur of “No trumps ... yes ... diamonds.... Who dealt?... No bid.... No ... yes ... no ...”, held her to her seat, soothed by the mesmeric touch of habit.
At the Rectory Mrs. Merriman exclaimed: “Oh, there she is!” in a tone implying that she had had to stand between Mrs. Clephane and the assembled committee.
Kate remembered that she was secretary, and expected to read the minutes.
“Have I kept you all waiting? So sorry,” she beamed, in a voice that sang hallelujahs. Mrs. Merriman pushed the book toward her with a protecting smile; and Mrs. Parley Plush of the Villa Mimosa (she always told you it had been quite her own idea, calling it that) visibly wondered that Mrs. Merriman should be so tolerant.
They were all there: the American Consul’s wife, mild, plump and irreproachable; the lovely Mrs. Prentiss of San Francisco, who “took things” and had been involved in a drug scandal; the Comtesse de Sainte Maxime, who had been a Loach of Philadelphia, and had figured briefly on the operatic stage; the Consul’s sister, who dressed like a flapper, and had been engaged during the war to a series of American officers, all of whom seemed to have given her celluloid bangles; and a pale Mrs. Marsh, who used to be seen about with a tall tired man called “the Colonel”, whose family-name was not Marsh, but for whom she wore mourning when he died, explaining—somewhat belatedly—that he was a cousin. Lastly, there was Mrs. Fred Langly of Albany, whose husband was “wanted” at home for misappropriation of funds, and who, emerging from the long seclusion consequent on this unfortunate episode, had now blossomed into a “prominent war-worker”, while Mr. Langly devoted himself to the composition of patriotic poems, which he read (flanked by the civil and military authorities) at all the allied Inaugurations and Commemorations; so that by the close of the war he had become its recognized bard, and his “Lafayette, can we forget?” was quoted with tears by the very widows and orphans he had defrauded. Facing Mrs. Merriman sat the Rector, in clerical pepper-and-salt clothes and a secular pepper-and-salt moustache, talking cheerful slang in a pulpit voice.