Mrs. Cutting set her lips in a straight white line. “I recognize only one code of morals. We Americans are brought up on splendid old-fashioned principles. Nor do I recall anything in the Bible that might be construed as exempting genius from the code that is necessary to preserve society from anarchy.”
Mabel interposed hurriedly. She knew that on certain points her mother was rigid, and she, too, regarded people that misbehaved themselves with shocked disapproval. But it was too soon to put her husband on the defensive. “Mother dear,” she said, in her clear little voice, “don’t you think you might relax your rule for once, as Countess Tann is a friend of Jackie’s? Besides, perhaps it is our duty to encourage these people when they are trying to do right. Both Princess Nachmeister and Mr. Levering say that her life has been exemplary in Munich. If we snubbed her, we might drive her to the bad again.”
As she concluded her little effort she looked eagerly at her husband, expecting a flash of gratitude from his expressive eyes, and not only for coming to his rescue, but for refraining from the common jealousy of wives. But Ordham averted his gaze, conscious of a still more intense irritation. Mabel was not clever enough to play her part in daily intercourse, little as she suspected it; and there were times when she quite forgot the rôle she now knew it was necessary to act in order to reinspire her husband with the belief that he had married the ideal woman. Few women can spend their lives in full dress. In humbler walks of life than Mabel’s, the wife exhibits herself to her husband in curl papers and untidy wrappers. Mabel’s toilettes would have been perfect on a desert island had her trunks been washed ashore, but to let her mind run down at the heels was a temptation not to be resisted, now and again, for had she not bagged her quarry? And although she schemed to please her husband, adopted all the wise advice of Lady Pat, crossing him in nothing and surrounding him with diversions, still would she read no more books, still would she chatter; and she avoided “clever” men and women as she would the plague. To know how to manage a man was cleverness enough; what she did not know was that deft management, while it may achieve certain results, is not always redolent of charm. Ordham avoided her by the aid of every device his fertile brain could suggest, for he dreaded the moment when self-restraint would snap and betray him into wounding the poor little thing. She might be a silly child, but he appreciated that she loved him devotedly. This uxorious affection, however, was irritating him in more ways than one. Since their return to town hardly a day had passed that she had not given him a present. Extravagant and wealthy, it delighted her to shower costly “trifles” on her husband; his rooms were littered with superb and superfluous baubles. The new cigarette case in his pocket was of gold incrusted with jewels, the old silver necessaries of his dressing-table had been replaced with gold; he had now five watches, eight cigarette cases and match boxes, fourteen ash trays, three sets of white pearls of the first water and one of black, more cuff links than he pretended to count, four sets of furnishings for his writing table, one of gold, one of Russian enamel, one of Dresden china, and one of antique silver; and so on, ad infinitum. Many of these precious objects were inscribed “Jackie.”
Only that morning it had occurred to him that all this stuff represented a sum far in excess of the wretched thousand pounds which had caused him so much torment and debasement of spirit, and he had felt not only vexed at the senseless extravagance, but sick of saying “Thank you”; the constant repetition of which phrase creates in time a sense of obligation fatal both in love and friendship. Feeling that if called upon once more to tell her, upon her daily return from Bond Street, that she was the most marvellous and the most generous creature in the world, he should disgrace himself, he had announced with playful decision that she must waste no more money on him; he could not accustom himself all at once to such extravagance, had a vague sense of defrauding the poor—these were the only excuses he could think of. Mabel, who had heard of his princely expenditures in Paris on an income of £500 a year, was astonished, but inferred that he still felt the difference in their fortunes, and had too much humour to return her presents with the money she had given him. But nothing had been further from Jackie’s mind than this delicate hair-splitting. The £200,000 he regarded as a right and proper marriage settlement, not as a present; he had never mentioned the subject to his wife. And whereas nobody liked making presents better than himself, he made appropriate ones; and if he gave none to Mabel, it was because he could think of nothing she did not possess already.
So he avoided her eyes when she flew to his relief, left his seat once more, and with his back to them ground his teeth. He had himself well in hand, but he was still too young to have at his absolute command that gay and impenetrable mask, that perfect suavity of manner, for which he is celebrated to-day. Nevertheless, he always rallied his unevenly developed gifts in such crises as these.
“I don’t think it is worth while to discuss the question from an ethical standpoint,” he said in a moment, turning to his wife with a smile on his lips and none in his eyes. “Countess Tann, admitting that she ever dwelt without the pale, will not be driven back by any act of ours. She has the strongest character of any person I have ever known. The question is merely this: I feel under certain obligations of hospitality to her which I should be glad to discharge, and she is a great artist who gives the world far more than it can ever give her in return. Granting that she is this Margaret Hill of Levering’s, society is now too deeply in her debt to consider anything but the interest it must pay as long as she remains in the position to demand it.”
“I quite agree with you—up to a certain point.” Mrs. Cutting had almost visibly choked over the largest doses of British insolence she had ever been called upon to swallow, but she forced her lips to smile. “I am quite willing to take a box at the opera, show myself often, and lend it to my friends at other times—there are so many Americans in London just now. I am not as young and as modern as you are, but at least I should never dream of boycotting a stage artist in her own sphere; I am as ready as any one to acknowledge the debt of the ordinary mortal to genius. And nothing has ever distressed me more than the dreadful tales of gifted people dying in garrets because a selfish world would not pause to listen to them. But never, willingly at least, have I received under my roof a woman of blemished reputation. My mother and my grandmother were both leaders of society in New York, and that was their inflexible rule; I was brought up on it. As you English people are so much more—charitable, let us call it—I have endeavoured to make up my mind to believe no gossip unproven by the divorce courts; but really, some things are a bit too flagrant, and one professional beauty, at least, who was here this afternoon will never come again by invitation. And if I decline to receive a woman who has fairly blossomed in the sunshine of royalty, and who is well born and bred, I can hardly be expected to receive a creature that began life as a social outcast. I do not assert anything so foolish, of course,” she added hastily, “as that we have not a certain small percentage of wicked and foolish women in American society. I am merely emphasizing the standard of the country, and I for one shall continue to uphold it as a matter both of principle and inclination.”
“Both are highly commendable, but, it strikes me, a trifle provincial and inconvenient. In a new country I can understand that you must draw hard and fast lines, but now that you have come to live among people that are quite sure of themselves, why not emulate their independence? It has struck me more than once since I have had the pleasure of knowing so many Americans, that we have more independence, freedom, under our old-fashioned monarchy, than you under a form of government where those words may be worn meaningless with too constant iteration; you seem to have an idea that their antithesis is aristocratic.”
“I don’t think you see my point.” Mrs. Cutting’s tones were so even that they were monotonous, and she fixed her eyes on her fan. “You English aristocrats indulge in the fiction that you are above all laws, are a law unto yourselves. You are mental and moral anarchists. With us it is quite different. It may be because we are new, but one thing is quite positive: our standards are higher than yours, and they are fixed. We are as free of mind as you are, but we don’t choose to use our freedom in the same way. We reverence the laws we have accepted from the highest authority, because they are right and proper laws, because they conduce to purity of conduct and true happiness. But you—you English might exist on a planet of your own. And yet you are a mass of contradictions. Mr. Wilde was lamenting to-day, for the fortieth time, of British provincialism, respectability, philistinism. Others make the same lament. I have seen little of it myself. You—I am talking of your class, of course,—use those characteristics as an excuse when it happens to be convenient. To be just, I have not the slightest doubt that most of the women I meet are faithful wives, but it is only because the reverse does not appeal to them; they would admit, if pushed to the wall, that the laws made to govern the conduct of common mortals do not apply to them—certainly not! But if their anarchy—or, shall we say, their insolence?—does not take that form, it does some other. The only absolutely well-regulated women, according to the American standard, that I have met in England, are, it would seem, survivals from your middle class.”
“It is irresistible, dear Mrs. Cutting, to ask why, since you admire your own country and despise ours, you have come to live among us?”