Mrs. Forbes rose and the maid enveloped her in a long mantle of white velvet lined with ermine. The old negress adjusted the inner flap over the chest and wrapped a lace scarf about the softly-dressed hair.
“You is a leetle nervous, honey,” she said. “Has anything put yo’ out? Don’t you tetch one bit o’ sweets to-night and not a drap o’ coffee.”
“I’ll have it out when we come home, and get it over,” thought Mrs. Forbes as she went down the stair and smiled to her husband, who awaited her in the hall below. “That is what is making me so nervous.”
Mr. Forbes, like many New York millionaires, had spread his house over all the land he could buy in one spot on The Avenue, and there was no porte cochère. When his wife was obliged to go out in stormy weather an awning was erected between the front doors and the curb-stone. To-night it was snowing heavily. As she appeared on the stair two men-servants opened the doors and flung a carpet from the threshold to the carriage-step. If Virginia Forbes had ever wet her boots or slippers she could not recall the occasion.
She was the sensation of the dinner and of the reception afterward. The foreigners stood about her in a rivetted cluster, and with the extravagance of their kind assured her that there was no woman in Europe at once so beautiful and so clever. She took their flatteries for what they were worth; they could have salaamed before her without turning her head; but she revelled in the adulation, nevertheless.
Mr. Forbes had two important letters to write when they returned home, and she went with him to the library. As he took the chair before his desk she got him a fresh pen, then poured him some whisky from the decanter. She was as fresh as when she had left the house, and he looked at her with passionate admiration.
“I should like to be able to tell you how proud I was of you to-night,” he said. “Sometimes I believe that you are really the most splendid creature on earth.”
“That is what those princelings were telling me,” she said, rumpling his hair. “But you flatter me much more, for I may suspect that you mean it.”
“Well, sit where I can’t see you or I sha’n’t do much writing. Don’t go, though.”
She took an easy chair by the fire, but although she lay in its depths and put her little feet on a low pouf, she drew the long rope of jewels nervously through her fingers. Once or twice her breath came short, and then she clasped the rubies so closely that the setting dented her skin.