“I don’t dance at a great many balls. Let me see—I haven’t danced for—“
“Oh, I know. Well, I’m just from a dinner at Secretary Slater’s, where that ridiculous little Mrs. Hill-Smith, his daughter, was in great feather, and also the Baldwin girl and Anne Clavering.”
“You ought to beg Miss Clavering’s pardon for bracketing her with Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor Baldwin.”
“My dear boy, it would make you die laughing to see the patronizing air Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor Baldwin put on with Anne Clavering. As the Slater family is at least forty years old and the Brentwood-Baldwins quite twenty years old, they regard the Claverings, who have come up within the last six years, very much as the old French nobility regarded the bourgeoisie. But I think Anne Clavering is a match for them. Indeed, she proved herself a match for a much more considerable antagonist—that is, myself—this very night.”
“Have you been impertinent to Miss Clavering?”
“Well, Richard, my dear boy, I am afraid I have been. But it was all the fault of those two foolish creatures, Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor Baldwin. It was in this way. The gentlemen,”—Mrs. Luttrell still used this antique word,—“the gentlemen had come into the drawing-room after dinner—very prim and proper they were after their cigarettes and two glasses of hock. In my time, when the gentlemen came in after dinner they were always as merry as lords and delightfully free: I have been slapped on the back by Daniel Webster at a dinner, when I was sixteen years old. But nothing so agreeable happens now—and there aren’t any Daniel Websters, either. Well, when I was talking to that ridiculous Mrs. Hill-Smith something unluckily started me off upon the new people in Washington. Mrs. Hill-Smith, you know, assumes that she has sixteen quarterings, so she has to grin and bear it when I begin telling about people; and I always say to her, ‘You and I, Mrs. Hill-Smith, who knew some people before 1860.’ Somebody was speaking about Mrs. James Van Cortlandt Skinner’s private chaplain—that woman has added much to the gayety of nations. There’s a story going around that she had a darling of a fight over it, not only with the bishop, but with the bishop’s wife; and I was giving a very amusing account of it, when Anne Clavering quietly remarked that she happened to know that Mrs. Skinner had not spoken of it yet to the bishop. Of course this spoiled my story, and I was a little cross about it. Judge Woodford was present, and he told a pleasant little tale about my grandfather having been very cross on one occasion, and having pulled somebody’s nose, and I said my crossness was a case of atavism on my part. And so it was turned into a joke. When we were leaving I was sorry I had been short with Anne Clavering, so I went up and asked her to come and see me on my next day at home, and to pour tea for me—that I still held to the good old fashion of keeping a day at home and seeing my friends. And what do you think the minx said? She was very sorry, but she had an attack of atavism, too,—her grandfather wasn’t used to afternoon tea and she had never acquired any real taste for it!”
Baskerville laughed delightedly.
“Oh, it wasn’t so clever, after all,” said Mrs. Luttrell, smiling with that unshakable good humor which was the most exasperating thing on earth to all her enemies and her friends alike. “It is just because you’re in love with Anne Clavering; and I think she likes you pretty well, too.”
Baskerville sat up then, sobered in an instant. What Mrs. Luttrell knew or suspected all Washington would shortly know. “Why do you say that?” he asked quietly.