“Well, you must not make fun of us, for I am simply bent on having all the girls adore you, particularly Augusta. The other day we had a lovely meeting. It was here. I have the prettiest boudoir: Alex designed it. It looks just like a rainbow. I lay on the couch in a gown to match, and the girls all took off their stiff street frocks and put on my wrappers, and we smoked cigarettes and ate bon-bons, and read Karl Marx. It was lovely! I didn’t understand a word, but I felt intellectual—the atmosphere, you know. When we had finished a chapter and Alex had expounded it, and quarrelled over it with Augusta, we talked over all the men we knew, and I am sure men would be lots better if they knew what girls thought about them. Alex says we must regenerate them, quicken their souls, so to speak, and I suppose I may as well begin on you, although you’re not an American, and can’t vote—we’re for reforming the United States, you know. What is the state of your soul?” And again she gave her fresh childlike laugh.
“I haven’t any. Give me up. I am hopeless.” He was arriving at the conclusion that she was more amusing in detached chats, but reflected that she was certainly likeable. It was this last pertainment, added to the rumour of her father’s vast wealth, that had brought him across the water.
“I don’t know that I have ever seen one of the—what do they call them?—advanced women? But I am told that they are not Circean. That, indeed, seems to be their hall-mark. A woman’s first duty is to be attractive.”
“That’s what Fletcher says. Augusta is my most intimate friend, my very dearest friend, but I never saw a man look as if he was thinking about falling in love with her. How long shall you stay?” she added quickly, perceiving that he was tiring of the subject.
“I?—oh—I don’t know. Until you tell me that I bore you. I may take a run into Central America with Fletcher.”
“Into what? Why that’s days, and days, and days from here, and must be a horrid place to travel in.”
“I thought Chicago was only twenty-four hours from New York.”
“Oh, you funny, funny, deliciously funny Englishman! Why Central America doesn’t belong to the United States at all. It’s ’way down between North and South America or somewhere. I suppose you mean middle America. We call Chicago and all that part of the country West.”
“If it’s middle it’s central,” said the Duke, imperturbably. “You cannot expect me to command the vernacular of your enormous country in a day.”
He rose suddenly. A woman some twenty years older than Mabel had entered. Her face and air were excessively, almost aggressively refined, her carriage complacent, a trifle insolent. She was the faded prototype of her daughter. The resemblance was close and prophetic.