So much for Mame’s private thoughts. Wisely, however, they were careful not to get themselves uttered in those particular words.
XXVI
THESE were great days. It was not long before social engagements began to pour in upon Mame. She had surmised rightly that Lady Violet had influence. Indeed this new and most valuable friend seemed to have a finger in every pie. Her power of “wangling” things was extraordinary.
There could be no doubt about her popularity. And it was not confined to one class. The charlady at the flat, the young man who delivered the milk, the stalwart ex-soldier who worked the lift, right up to the formidable Davis and the princes of the earth were one and all devoted to her. For one thing she was the soul of good humour, with a word and a smile for everybody; and she had a divine faculty of loving a kind action for its own sake.
Lady Violet was a general favourite and she had many strings to pull. As far as Mame was concerned she pulled them freely. Little Miss Chicago began to be invited here, there, and everywhere. And surprisingly few questions were asked. At the outset, it is true, certain nicely brushed and plucked eyebrows—mostly those of Miss Du Rance’s own countrywomen, who seemed to abound in Mayfair—were apt to go up at finding her sitting opposite them at dinner and at luncheon. But the fact that she was a protégée of Lady Violet’s seemed to accredit her, to account for her, as it were.
Mrs. Creber Newsum, quite frankly, had never heard the name Du Rance all the time she had lived in America. Lady Summerscale, née Vanderdecken, who owned to Chicago connections, had never heard of it either. As for the dear Duchess, whose great grandmother had taken out the original patent for the New York Four Hundred, she was sure, my dear, well she was quite, quite sure—!
Still, Mame had luck to begin with. And she had excellent brains. Above all she had a very judicious and clever sponsor. Lady Violet understood just how far she could go with her own particular world. She knew its little weaknesses and how to play upon them.
In launching, as much perhaps for her private amusement as for any other reason, “my friend Miss Du Rance of Chicago,” into this expensive hothouse, she contrived to let it be known in her own two-edged phrase that this little American “was the richest thing that ever happened.”
Certain people, to whom money was the beginning and the end of all things, were only too eager to accept the phrase at its face value. They took it quite literally. Somehow it so fully explained Miss Du Rance.
“Chicago, my dear.” One lynx-eyed old dowager would whisper to another who had the ears of a fox. “Poppa was hogs. One hears the money he made in the War was fabulous.”