Bertha laid her face near her upon the pillow.
"Yes," she said, brokenly. "You belong to me and I belong to you. I will stay here, Janey—with you."
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Sometimes during the winter, when she glanced around her parlor on the evenings of her receptions Bertha felt as if she was in a waking dream,—so many people of whom she seemed to know nothing were gathered about her; she saw strange faces on every side; a new element had appeared, which was gradually crowding out the old, and she herself felt that she was almost a stranger in it. Day by day, and by almost imperceptible degrees at first, various mysterious duties had devolved upon her. She had found herself calling at one house because the head of it was a member of a committee, at another because its mistress was a person whose influence over her husband it would be well to consider; she had issued an invitation here because the recipients must be pleased, another there because somebody was to be biassed in the right direction. The persons thus to be pleased and biassed were by no means invariably interesting. There was a stalwart Westerner or so, who made themselves almost too readily at home; an occasional rigid New Englander, who suspected a lack of purpose in the atmosphere; and a stray Southerner, who exhibited a tendency towards a large and rather exhaustive gallantry. As a rule, too, Bertha was obliged to admit that she found the men more easily entertained than the women, who were most of them new to their surroundings, and privately determined to do themselves credit and not be imposed upon by appearances; and when this was not the case were either timorously overpowered by a sense of their inadequacy to the situation, or calmly intrenched behind a shield of impassive composure, more discouraging than all else. It was not always easy to enliven such material: to be always ready with the right thing to say and do; to understand, as by inspiration, the intricacies of every occasion and the requirements of every mental condition, and while Bertha spared no effort, and used her every gift to the best of her ability, the result, even when comparatively successful, was rather productive of exhaustion, mental and physical.
"They don't care about me," she said to Arbuthnot one night, with a rueful laugh, as she looked around her. "And I am always afraid of their privately suspecting that I don't care about them. Sometimes when I look at them I cannot help being overpowered by a sense of there being a kind of ludicrousness in it all. Do you know, nearly every one of them has a reason for being here, and it is never by any chance connected with my reason for inviting them. I could give you some of the reasons. Shall I? Some of them are feminine reasons, and some of them are masculine. That woman at the end of the sofa—the thin, eager-looking one—comes because she wishes to accustom herself to society. Her husband is a 'rising man,' and she is in love with him, and has a hungry desire to keep pace with him. The woman she is talking to has a husband who wants something Senator Planefield may be induced to give him—and Senator Planefield is on his native heath here; that showy little Southern widow has a large claim against the government, and comes because she sees people she thinks it best to know. She is wanted because she has a favorite cousin who is given patriotically to opposing all measures not designed to benefit the South. It is rather fantastic when you reflect upon it, isn't it?"
"You know what I think about it without asking," answered Arbuthnot.
"Yes, you have told me," was her response; "but it will be all over before long, and then—Ah! there is Senator Blundel! Do you know, it is always a relief to me when he comes;" and she went toward him with a brighter look than Arbuthnot had seen her wear at any time during the entire evening.
It had taken her some time herself to decide why it was that she liked Blundel and felt at ease with him; in fact, up to the present period she had scarcely done more than decide that she did like him. She had not found his manner become more polished as their acquaintance progressed; he was neither gallant nor accomplished; he was always rather full of himself, in a genuine, masculine way. He was blunt, and by no means tactful; but she had never objected to him from the first, and after a while she had become conscious of feeling relief, as she had put it to Arbuthnot, when his strong, rather aggressive, personality presented itself upon the scene. He was not difficult to entertain, at least. Finding in her the best of listeners he entertained himself by talking to her, and by making sharp jokes, at which they both laughed with equal appreciation. He knew what to talk about too, and what subjects to joke on; and, however apparently communicative his mood might be, his opinions were always kept thriftily in hand.