“Then the progress of woman has not decreased the social importance of the clever man?” asked Fenton humbly.
“On the contrary, Mr. Fenton, it has enhanced it—by giving him a larger and more appreciative audience. The man of mental power would hold a higher place in a community containing many Mesdames de Staël than in a social circle possessing only one. Is it not so?”
“Do you know, Miss Van Vleck,” said Fenton, not answering her question directly, “that I begin to think that I shall owe you a great debt of gratitude?”
A slight tinge of red mounted to her face as her eyes met his. He impressed her as a man more fitted to bestow favors than to accept them.
“I don’t quite understand you,” she said softly.
“We owe much,” he continued, “to those who take us out of our mental grooves and give us a new standpoint from which to view the world. There may be a good deal of selfishness in occupying one’s mind entirely with man’s inhumanity to man, and blinding ourselves to man’s inhumanity to woman. I have to thank you for a new point of view.”
“But,” protested Gertrude, “I have said nothing that we do not read in print every day.”
“Even if that is so,” said Fenton, “truths that would make no impression on me if I read them on an editorial page come to me with startling force when you present them. I repeat, that I owe you a debt of gratitude.”
At that moment Mrs. Percy-Bartlett’s voice, a rich, highly-cultivated contralto, was heard, giving passionate expression to Heine’s mournful little story of the pine that dreamt of love. Richard Stoughton stood at the entrance to the music-room, forgetful of the crowd around him. There was something in her voice that seemed to be meant for him alone, something that told him she was thinking of the night when she had first sung the song to him. “I must be growing wofully egotistic,” he thought; but at that instant their eyes met, and his self-deprecation vanished.
She came to him after the applause had died away, and called his attention to an unoccupied corner of the drawing-room.