So, looking rather keenly at the young man through the smoke spiraling up through her fingers, Mrs. Weyman exclaimed with assumed casualness, “It’s rather sweet of Mrs. Nevin to be so nice to you young things! Having you to meet Michael Schwankovsky this afternoon and all! But I suppose, Prescott, you have unclassed yourself as a young thing by having produced ‘Stephen’s Fall’ and got famous. Glenn and Anne, of course, are merely being included along with you. Don’t you find her very charming?”
Enderly was holding Anne’s hand, for all the decorum of their appearance, as it lay between them on the divan, under a fold of her outspread skirt. “Oh, very charming,” he answered, with casualness as assumed as his hostess’. “Beauty, brains and magnetism, all working together, make a very high-powered charm. And she must have used the full force of it on her bootlegger. We don’t get the chance to buy that quality from ours, do we, Glenn!”
Mrs. Weyman crushed out her cigarette on a tray at her elbow. For the first time she felt definitely jarred by Enderly’s personality. “You’re quite wrong,” she said coldly. “Anything that Mrs. Nevin serves would be legal. Her cellar was stocked by her husband before the war, and it will last her a lifetime, the way she uses it. She doesn’t drink and give drinking parties as some society women do. She entertains with the same dignity and reasonableness that all of our kind of people did before prohibition. It’s the same with us. Anything you are served here is legal.” It was important for even a famous novelist to be aware of impeccability, when he was being entertained by it.
Enderly’s fingers had closed about Anne’s wrist, stifling her heart, while her mother took such pains with his social education. But he answered with disarming candor, “Oh, I took that quite for granted, about you, I mean. But I couldn’t know about Mrs. Nevin, could I? So many different sorts of people know her, or claim to, and boast of being entertained at Holly! And although she’s obviously a lady, she’s even more obviously a person of temperament, genius. I hadn’t associated her with Puritanism.”
“I didn’t mean you to! Mrs. Nevin is as far removed from anything Puritanical or priggish as I am. But she has character. Aristocracy, if you like. Self-respecting people must draw the line somewhere, even to-day. But they needn’t be bigoted. Look at me. I let Anne smoke. I even smoke with her. But that sort of tolerance doesn’t change one’s fundamental principles. In things that really matter, our kind of people are not changed at all. We keep our standards for ourselves and our associates pretty definite. And Mrs. Nevin is one of us, very much so.”
Glenn had just captured Ariel’s queen, but for all that his smile as he barged into the conversation at this point was a sardonic smile. “Hadn’t you got Mother doped out for yourself, Scribbler?” he asked his friend. “Pity to make her do it for you! Bad commentary on your analytical powers. Couldn’t you see, at first sight, that she is one of those simple souls who believe that this jazz-ridden world is as sound at bottom, possibly sounder, than the lost world of the Good Queen Vic? It has invented virtues, not lost them. Who ever heard of frankness, honesty, hatred of shams before our somber decade? We’re less prudish, of course, but all the more wholesome for precisely that reason. And though somewhat obscured by the camouflage of ‘petting,’ purity still reigns supreme in girlish hearts, and honor in manly breasts. At least in the best families—like ours. Your own novel is only an example, Prescott. Its obscenity is healthy obscenity. By showing up the visible and ugly, you suggest all the more vividly the lovely idealism lurking under it all, invisible. Didn’t Stephen, in the end, after his diverting but possibly sordid passional experiences, fall in love, in the last chapters, with a nice girl? He seduced her, of course, but it woke her stupid parents up to the facts of—er—life. It’s a very idealistic book. Even the old folks got saved. They saw how narrow they’d been—”
“Oh, chuck it, Glenn! I’m in perfect sympathy with your mother. And I believe—in fact, I believe it passionately—that she is right. What is moderation and self-control but aristocracy? Our Bohemian pose is too cheap, too easy. What do you think, Anne?”
What Anne thought no one but Enderly discovered, however, for it was conveyed to him very simply by the throbbing of a pulse in a delicate, blue-veined wrist.
At that moment Miss Peters surprisingly made an appearance in the library door. “Mrs. Weyman Senior would be charmed if Miss Clare would care to come up to her for a little while this evening.”
Ariel sprang from the divan. “Oh, do you mind, Glenn? I do want to go.”