The go-getter spared her nothing. It had a royal time. She had been a fool. The lot of the fool was suffering. “You’ve broken a paw, honey. Always you’ll be a little mucker now. You’ll never be able to fix on anything again. No more will you be able to mark down your bird and fly at it. You’ll be unsettled for the rest of your days. Not always will you be brisk and quick; your looks, such as they are, and they’ve never been much to bank on, honey, are going already. These folks in London, England, who mocked at you and pulled your leg, you could have handed them a haymaker. But no, you must get fanciful and highfalutin.”
Yes, the go-getter with the sardonic voice and a flow of rather second-rate conversation had a royal time. He spared her nothing. She was unworthy of herself, of her breed, of her clan. Idealism. The hearty fellow landed his simp of a partner a blow on the point. If some of these honest-to-God Americans didn’t watch out, Idealism was going to be their ruin. You didn’t catch the dyed-in-the-wool Britisher playing around with flams of that kind. He was a pretty successful merchant, the Britisher, but he was content to leave idealism to other people. As a business man he was a model for the world. And why? Because with all his lip service he knew how to keep the soft stuff apart from the hard.
Poor Mame! She trudged half the day about the streets of a hostile city. With that pressure upon her spirit it was impossible to stay quiet indoors. Her very soul seemed to ache. Every syllable was true that was whispered in her overwrought ear. She had gone back on all she had ever stood for. They had put one over on her, these hard-roed Britishers. Yes, she must be cuckoo. You came over to pull big stuff, whispered the relentless voice. And by cripes, Mame Durrance, you’ve pulled it!
Tired out at last with tramping the West End parks and squares, she took a little food in a restaurant in a by-street of Soho. There she was likely to meet no one she knew. She was not in a mood to face her kind. As she ate her soup a nostalgia came upon her. After all, she was in a strange land, an alien. Their ways were not her ways; they had a different viewpoint; their method of doing things was not the same. She began to long for the sight and the sound of the homely, hearty, warm-blooded folks she had known; the folks who spoke the same language as herself, in the curious drawl that lately she had been taking such pains to get rid of.
Her thoughts went back to the land where she belonged. In the bitterest hour she had known since she had started out from her home town to see life, she had a craving for the friendly easy-goingness of her own kind. She had crowded a lot of experience into her European pilgrimage; in certain ways her luck had been truly remarkable. Mame Durrance had made good at her job; but this evening with a very large size “black monkey” upon her, she had a sudden yearning for the larger and freer air of her native continent.
Miserably unhappy she returned to the flat about nine o’clock. Lady Violet had been home from the revels, had inquired for her anxiously, but had changed her dress and gone out to dinner. Evidently she was making a day of it. Mame was not sorry. She had no wish to be caught in this mood. Yet she had no desire for bed. She would not be able to sleep if she turned in. The ache in her heart was terrible. If she could not learn to subdue it, for the first time in her life she would be driven to take a drug.
Suddenly her eye lit on a package on the writing table. It bore the label of a New York publisher and was addressed to herself. Perfunctorily she tore off the wrapper. A novel in a gay jacket was revealed. It was called Prairie City; and the name of the author was Elmer Pell Dobree.
Mame’s heart leaped. Coincidence has an arm notoriously long, but nothing could have been more timely than the arrival of this book. Her thoughts rushed back to the source of its being. And as if to speed them on their way, a letter had been enclosed in the parcel.
Characteristically it ran:
Dear Mame,