It was very odd. But it was distinctly thrilling. There was no need to be so humble after all. The girl evidently was interested in Miss Du Rance and had gone out of her way to do her a service. And Miss Du Rance did not mind owning that she had been a little too ready to suspect her of not being on the level.
With a sensation of deep but quiet triumph Mame listened now to the tabbies faintly purring over their teacups. It called for self-control not to ask the arch-puss, who gave herself out a bishop’s niece, upon whom Mame had an especial down, whether she was going to the ceremony at St. Margaret’s or to the reception at Clanborough House, or whether she meant to do both?—although privately quite sure that the old stiff was going to do neither. Happily she remembered a text of the village preacher in the grim days when she had to endure him every Sunday: “Be not exalted lest ye be cast down.”
In spite of a glow in the centre of her being, the warning in those words could not have been more salutary. So fully had Clanborough House been dismissed from Mame’s thoughts that she had already made up her mind to quit London as soon as possible. In fact, she had just informed Mrs. Toogood that she would not require a room beyond Saturday; and she had decided to go immediately after breakfast to-morrow morning, Wednesday, to book a second-class berth in the Vittoria, which was to sail three days later for New York.
The invitation to Clanborough House looked like changing all that. It rather set Mame on the horns of a dilemma. A girl truly wise would stick to the plan she had made, the voice of prudence told her. Clanborough House would probably mean another fortnight in London; it would involve her in a new hat and other expense; and if she was not careful such a hole would be cut in her purse that alarmingly few dollars would remain in it by the time she found herself back on Broadway.
These reflections gave Mame a jolt. A lot of use an invite to Clanborough House, if the price of it brought you to your uppers. Aunt Lou’s legacy would be gone, along with the hundred and ten dollars she had been able to save. Her job would be lost. And in a place like New York it was no certainty that she would get another at short notice. She had heard it described by those who should know as the cruelest place on earth for persons who were up against it.
These were problems. Invitation in hand, Mame fiercely considered them. Should she? Or should she not? The famous highbrow William Shakespeare, according to the office calendar whose mottoes she had by heart, the famous highbrow William Shakespeare had made the statement that “there is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”
It might be so. That was true, no doubt, for some. But again, for others it was quite likely not to be true. Circumstances alter cases. William Shakespeare was writing in the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth when there were not so darn many go-getters around. In his time there were not more people than jobs and all the seats in the public parks of the big cities were not overflowing with those who couldn’t raise the price of a meal.
A problem, sure. On the one hand, prudence, foresight, a looking-before-and-after; on the other, ambition, hope, adventure, all the worth-while things. Such a chance would never recur. And if she had brain enough to use it in the right way, there was no saying where it might lead.
Mame spent a very restless night. But somewhere in the small hours, when her mind was at its most lucid, she took the momentous decision to follow her star.
If she turned back now, with the gates of her kingdom opening wide, she never deserved to see them again. “Stick it, Mame.” That had always been her slogan, even in the cold hour of sun-up before the day’s work began or over a guttering candle after it was done, when secretly she gave her whole mind to the hard and dry study of stenography.