CHAPTER VI
Alice had been married five years--it seemed a long time. The first five years of married life are likely to be long enough to chart pretty accurately the currents of the future, however insufficient to predict just where those currents will carry one.
Much disillusioning comes in the first five years; when they have passed we know less of ourselves and more of our consort. Undoubtedly the complement of this is true, and our consort knows more of us; but this thought, not always reassuring, comes only when we reflect concerning ourselves, which fortunately, perhaps, is not often. Married people, if we may judge from what they say, tend to reflect more concerning their mates.
Alice, it is certain, knew less of herself. Much of the confidence of five years earlier she had parted with, some of it cruelly. Yet coming at twenty-five into the Kimberly circle, and with the probability of remaining in it, of its being to her a new picture of life, Alice gradually renewed her youth. Some current flowing from this joy of living seemed to revive in her the illusions of girlhood. All that she now questioned was whether it really was for her.
Her husband enjoyed her promise of success in their new surroundings without realizing in the least how clearly those about them discriminated between his wife and himself. She brought one quality that was priceless among those with whom she now mingled--freshness.
Among such people her wares of mental aptness, intelligence, amiability, not to discuss a charm of person that gave her a place among women, were rated higher than they could have been elsewhere. She breathed in her new atmosphere with a renewed confidence, for nothing is more gratifying than to be judged by what we believe to be the best in us; and nothing more reassuring after being neglected by stupid people than to find ourselves approved by the best.
Walter MacBirney, her husband, representing himself and his Western associates, and now looked on by them as a man who had forced recognition from the Kimberly interests, made on his side, too, a favorable impression among the men with whom his affairs brought him for the first time in contact.
If there was an exception to such an impression it was with Robert Kimberly, but even with him MacBirney maintained easily the reputation accorded to Western men for general capacity and a certain driving ability for putting things through.
He was described as self-made; and examined with the quiet curiosity of those less fortunate Eastern men who were unwilling or unable to ascribe their authorship to themselves, he made a satisfactory showing.
In the Kimberly coterie of men, which consisted in truth more of the staff associates in the Kimberly activities than of the Kimberlys themselves, the appearance of MacBirney on the scene at Second Lake was a matter of interest to every one of the fledgling magnates, who, under the larger wing of the Kimberlys, directed the commercial end of their interests.