Wemyss shuddered. “Ah, my dear lady, I wish I could forget that you were married——”
“Hush, hush,” cried Mrs. Gower, rapping Wemyss’s knuckles with her fan, “and soyez sage, when we are gone.”
But when left to themselves, Mr. Wemyss said little besides a word or two about literature and art. His conversation might have been a model to a governess fresh from boarding-school. Jimmy De Witt told a few stories, and Arthur had great difficulty in talking at all. Mr. Wemyss snubbed them both, as was his habit with intellectual inferiors; and after a very short cigar, they all repaired to the drawing-room, where little happened that Arthur saw; for, as all the company save Mrs. Gower seemed to regard him as an interloping hobbledehoy, to be tolerated only as a fantasy of Mrs. Gower’s, he shortly and not over-gracefully took his leave.
He walked to the club, and smoked, somewhat nettled with things in general, and full of much desire to punch Mr. Caryl Wemyss’s elegant head. Others had had that mood before Arthur; but you see our hero is by no means an exceptional personage. Being, however, the best we have got, we feel bound to see him through. Still, no Loyola would have chosen that dinner to be the time and place to reply to Wemyss with the propositions we have stated for Arthur at the beginning of this chapter; and the young idealist had wisely held his peace.
CHAPTER X.
IN WHICH ARTHUR MEETS A WEARIED SOUL.
NOW Mrs. Levison Gower, like Napoleon after Marengo and Austerlitz, was suffering from ennui. This malady of modern times executes its most dangerous ravages, like the gout, only among those who can afford it. It is a sort of king’s evil, privileged to the nobility and gentry; and that Flossie Starbuck’s healthy constitution ever succumbed to it is testimony—is it not?—to her extraordinary natural refinement: for born to it she certainly was not. She was a woman of some five-and-thirty summers—let us rather say, of some fifteen seasons, as being both politer and more closely descriptive—but with her thick blonde hair and her youthful figure, round and lithe as any girl’s, she was divine still in a riding-habit or a ball-dress, and could face the daylight of a north window without flinching. But the fact was, this Marguerite in appearance had been out fifteen seasons; if not so erudite as Faust, she was even more blasée with the world; kermesses had become stupid, interesting young men with rapiers and mysterious attendants in red had lost their interest, even jewels had ceased to make her heart beat as of yore: Mephistopheles alone remained eternal.
All the joys of her girl’s ambition she had tasted to the full. Every social eminence that she had seen, she had in turn attained. Each one of the diversions of a woman of fashion, she had pushed to its ultimate—gayety pure and simple, haughty and costly exclusiveness, travel and adventure, the patronage of literature and art, even religion and charity. But Mrs. Gower had been so unfortunate as to take her greatest pleasure at the beginning of her young life. Compared with that triumphal moment when first, surrounded by ladies with names she had hitherto known only in the newspapers, she had taken her place among the patronesses of the F. F. V. Ball as “Mrs. Levison Gower, Jr.”—what were all the second-hand joys of the imagination, of looking at books and pictures, even the more solid satisfactions of houses, opera-boxes, horses and liveries, or of social power? The life of the world was Mrs. Gower’s book; she made her own drama; any starveling in a garret could have the other kind. But that earliest pleasure was indeed divine. She had met the enemy, and made them hers. And how the dowagers had scowled at her, at first! The haughty Vans, the poor and lofty matrons of the old manorial families of New York, exemplary, unapproachable, Presbyterian. She had routed them with a flirt of her fan; she had dared their feudal armor with her bared fair breast. Their dowdy daughters had been snuffed out of fashion like candles in electric light; a spark of wit had made them laughable, a glance of her soft eyes had brought their brothers to her feet. Her chic had won the day, and soon they all began to copy her. Her phaeton and her ponies replaced the antiquated family rockaways; her style made up for breeding, and largely it was Flossie’s work that money in New York became the all-in-all, and blood an antiquated prejudice to jest at. And all the Einsteins and the Malgams and Duvals made haste to cluster under Flossie’s standard, wanting such a leader; and we Americans throw up our hats and cry how nice and democratic is the change—do we not? How proud was simple Lucie Gower to find him husband to a goddess! How natural for Caryl Wemyss to worship her, the spirit of his favorite decadence!
But still, that early and delightful triumph had been the climax of her life, as it now seemed; all other pleasures had proved silly or insipid. What gratification was it to her to move in the best society? The whole pleasure lay in getting there. She cared nothing for the best society, except in so far as she could humble it, and make it hers. Secretly, Flossie found more sympathy in her new friends of the Duval set than in the old-fashioned Van Kulls and Breviers of her husband’s family. The best people bored her. But the Duvals were nothing if not amusing, and had a truly French horror of the ennuyeux.
But she was a leader of it; there was still some satisfaction left in that. Her leadership was unquestioned; through whatever will-of-the-wisp of folly she chose to lead the dance, the many (and these the richest, newest, and most prominent) would follow. Mrs. Malgam alone could for a moment contest her prominence—“Baby” Malgam, whose fashionable inanity and lazy beauty had proved almost as good cards as Flossie’s cleverness. And the further she went, the faster would her people follow; for the Duvals and Einsteins were wild to écraser, by ostentation of their wealth, all those whose position rested on the slightest shadow of superiority that money could not buy. All these people, Flossie knew, would hail her as a leader and grovel at her feet; she, who represented, for her husband’s family, an older style than theirs, if she would be with them and of them. And the old style of things, which had satisfied her for fifteen years, was just now, certainly, beginning to bore her. The drama of her life lacked action.