“No, no, stupid, but for next winter, I mean. I’m determined to have Charlie lead my german, you know; they say all the young married women are fighting for him. And the only other man is Daisy Blake, and he’s too slow for anything. Besides, I’m dead in love with Townley, you know.”
“Oh,” said Gracie.
“I heard he gave a supper-party last night, and both Mrs. Gower and Mrs. Malgam were there, and the Earl of Birmingham; and afterward they all went in masks to a public ball. Wasn’t it horrid? And just think what fun it would be to get him away from those married women? Why, Marion Roster told me last year that the débutantes had no chance at all. I’ll see about that.” And Mamie stamped her little foot and tossed her pretty head defiantly; and indeed it looked as if the filly might make it hard running for the four-year-olds. And Charlie Townley, had he seen it, might have felt that he had gotten his reward on earth. For I doubt if any poet’s bays or any soldier’s laurel were more highly prized by maid or wife than Mamie, the rich, well-bred, well-born, rated Charlie Townley’s style of excellence. Le style c’est l’homme, says some old, grave writer; what then is style to a giddy young woman? And I doubt if either bays or laurel be so marketable. And Charlie was a man of the world, familiar to its stock-exchanges; who did not mean to marry, but meant to marry well.
Gracie looked at Mamie Livingstone with some faint wonder; and then the young girl laughed loudly, as was usual, and kissed her, and called her a dear old thing; and laughed again, as if she had been jesting. And so the other one supposed it, and smiled back through Mamie’s many kisses.
“Look here,” Mamie began again, with a gesture of triumph; and she pulled a note from her pocket, and waved it triumphantly in Gracie’s face. “I’ve got a note from him already!”
“Oh, Mamie——”
“’Sh, Ma’am Prunes and Prisms—it’s only about a summer fan. I asked him to get a kind which I knew had only been made at one place down-town, and they were all sold out, so he had to write and tell me so. See, isn’t the signature nice? ‘your devoted servant, Charles Townley’—and such a nice manly hand.” And Mamie roguishly made pretence of kissing it, the while her eyes danced with merriment. Gracie looked at her—puzzled; and Mamie only laughed the more. “There, there, don’t look so grave, you delightful old darling; it’s not so awfully serious, after all—yet.” And with the final burst of laughter that accompanied her last word, Mamie danced from the room.
Left alone, Gracie’s smile, which had reflected Mamie’s, changed to a deeper look, a look that Mamie’s face could never mirror. Yes, it was a puzzle, in a way; people so rarely seemed to care for the essentials of things. Gracie’s notion of a man was enlightened heroism, of a woman perfect bravery and trust, and the light in the lives of both the light of the world that comes from another, like the sun’s. But to these young ladies and gentlemen, the light of the world was the light of a ball-room.
So she sat there, looking northward over the roofs and steeples, to the bright sky-line; and perhaps, if an eye were at the other end of that ray of light that slanted through space to meet her own, it saw a human soul. But to the telegraph wires and brick chimneys, to Mamie and the men near by on the roofs, it was a girl with a pretty face like another.
Human nature, they tell us; and another says, people are all alike when it comes to the point; and the motives of mankind have ever been the same, says a third. The course of history is thus and so; it is human nature to do this, and take this bundle of hay rather than that; and we are all alike, they repeat again; scholars, men, and books repeat again, until we do become human nature—or drown ourselves in preference.