Ruyler had not, but she looked so eager and sweet—she was lunching with him at the Palace Hotel on the day following his interview with Spaulding—that he hastened to assure her affectionately that the certainty of his wife's desire for his constant companionship was both his torment and his consolation.
Hélène continued radiantly:
"Besides, darling, Polly Roberts is staying on. Rex can't get away yet."
"Polly Roberts is not nearly good enough for you. She hasn't an idea in her head and lives on excitement—"
Hélène laughed merrily. "You are quite right, but there's no harm in her. After all, unless one goes in for charities (and I can't, Price, yet; besides the charities here are wonderfully looked after), plays bridge, has babies, takes on suffrage—what is there to do but play? I suppose once life was serious for young women of our class; but we just get into the habit of doing nothing because there's nothing to do. Take to-morrow as an example: I suppose Polly and I will wander down to The Louvre in the morning and buy something or look at the new gowns M. Dupont has just brought from Paris.
"Then we'll lunch where there's lots of life and everybody is chatting gayly about nothing.
"Then we'll go to the Moving Pictures unless there is a matinée, and then we'll motor out to the Boulevard, and then back and have tea somewhere.
"Or, perhaps, we'll motor down to the Club at Burlingame for lunch and chatter away the day on the veranda, or dance. This afternoon we'll probably ring up a few that are still in town, and dance in Polly's parlor at the Fairmont."
Hélène's lip curled, her voice had risen. With, all her young enjoyment of wealth and position, she had been bred in a class where to idle is a crime. "Just putting in time—time that ought to be as precious as youth and high spirits and ease and popularity! But what is one to do? I have no talents, and I'd lose caste in my set if I had. I don't wonder the Socialists hate us and want to put us all to work. No doubt we should be much happier. But now—even if you retired from business, you'd spend most of your time on the links. We poor women wouldn't be much better off."
"It does seem an abnormal state of affairs; I've barely given it a thought, it has always been such a pleasure to find you, after a hard day's work, looking invariably dainty, and pretty, and eloquently suggestive of leisure and repose. But—to the student of history—I suppose it is a condition that cannot last. There must be some sort of upheaval due. Well, I hope it will give me more of your society."