"Yes; he don't do that often. When he does, it makes a difference; it ought to."
The whole matter was coming to assume the aspect of a personal favor; it was a debt of honor, after all. The grocer, the upholsterer, and the rest of them might wait; it would give them time to learn the value of an elegant "presence" and the compelling force of personal acquaintance.
The doors, hung and paid for, swung open many times during the following winter and spring, to admit people whom, as his wife assured him, it was an advantage to know. He became conscious that she was actuated by motives quite different from his, and that she had a standard quite at variance from any that he himself would have set up. She strained for people that he would not have turned his hand for. Most of these had familiar names, and it sometimes seemed to him as if many of them had had their place in the social yearnings of Cornelia McNabb. Certainly, his wife's attitude was quite different from that of the Floyds, who had been disposed to pooh-pooh quietly almost everybody, and also from that of her own parents, who simply accepted the circle that chance and association had formed for them, and met everybody on the same dead level of good-will.
During Lent his wife arranged a small musicale; another Mary Munson had arrived—this time from Cincinnati. The names of the performers included only those of amateurs of the better sort—since she knew that good professional services were quite beyond her reach; yet chairs, awning, and refreshments called for the expense of outside supervision. The morning before it she put a slip of paper into his hands.
"You are going right past the Tribune. Won't you just leave this with them?"
It was an announcement of her musicale. It included a list of names—not those of the performers, but those of the listeners.
"All old friends—in print," her husband commented. "What do you care for these people? Why don't you ask the Fairchilds?—they're quiet, but they're nice; and they like music. Why don't you have your father and mother? I haven't seen either of them for a month."
His wife writhed delicately in protest. Her winter had increased her paleness. The blue veins were bluer in her temples; her large eyes looked larger yet, and there were faint circles under them.
"Well, Cecilia doesn't fancy Mrs. Fairchild very much, in the first place—"
George bit his lip. By the curious workings of chance he had never yet seen Cecilia Ingles, but he no longer joked about her non-actuality. She appeared to be looming up as the great power in his household.