“Is it true what I hear, that Richard Pinckney has become engaged to the girl who is staying there?” asked Silas.
Frances smiled.
“I don’t think so,” she replied. “Who told you?”
“Upon my word I forget,” said he, “but I judged mostly by my own eyes—they seemed like an engaged couple when I saw them last.”
New guests were arriving and she had to go forward to help in receiving them. Silas moved towards her, but in the next moment they had for a snatch of conversation, she did not refer to the subject, nor did he.
The Vernons people were late, so late that when they arrived they were the last of the guests; dancing was in progress and, on entering the ballroom, Richard Pinckney was treated to the pleasing sight of his fiancée whirling in the arms of Silas Grangerson.
Phyl, looking lovely in the simple, rather old-fashioned dress evolved for her by the combined geniuses of Maria Pinckney and Madame Organdie, produced that sensation which can only be evoked by newness, her effect was instantaneous and profound, it touched not only every one of these strangers but also Maria Pinckney and Richard. They had come with her, but it was only in the ballroom that they recognised with whom they had come.
So with a book, a picture, a play, the producer and his friends only recognise its merits fully when it is staged and condemned or praised by the public.
A débutante fails or succeeds at first glance, and the instantaneous success of Phyl was a record in successes.
And Frances Rhett had to watch it and dance. The Inquisition had its torments; Society has improved on them, for her victims cannot cry out and the torments of Frances Rhett were acute. Not that she was troubling much about Richard Pinckney and what the poisonous Silas had said; she was not in love with Richard Pinckney, but she was passionately in love with herself. She was the belle of Charleston; had been for the last year; and one of her chief incentives to marriage was an intuitive knowledge that prestige fades, that the position of principal girl in any society is like the position of the billiard ball the juggler balances on the end of a cue—precarious. She wanted to get married and ring down the curtain on an unspoiled success, and now in a moment she saw herself dethroned.