“Nonsense! He’s to come and see you at my house, and he’s to make friends with us all. Louis has been in the wrong, and he shall be made to see it. Leave that to me. I shall write young Decourcy a note as soon as I get home; and you shall write too, and endorse my invitation.”
Margaret felt very anxious that her cousin should come and dine at the Gastons’, but she seriously doubted his willingness to do so. Despite his perfect courtesy, there had been something in his manner toward Louis Gaston that made it clear that he did not desire to improve the latter’s acquaintance, and she wanted him to see that in the interview he had had with Gaston he had seen Louis at his worst, and to realize that he had a better side. And, on the other hand, she wanted the Gastons to see Alan Decourcy as a specimen of a Southern gentleman, who not only possessed, by inheritance, all the instincts and traditions that she clung to and respected, but who, in addition to these, had had sufficient contact with the world to get rid of that colossal belief in himself and his own methods and manners, as the only commendable ones, which she felt to be one of the chief failings of her countrymen. She had been too long accustomed to the arrogant assumption that a Southern man had better take the wrong way in any issue than learn the right way from a Yankee, not to rejoice in the prospect of presenting to her friends a young Southerner who was really enlightened, and who, if he loved his own land best, did so because he had compared it with others, and not because he was ignorant of everything beyond it.
But when Mrs. Gaston had despatched her note, inviting Mr. Decourcy to dine with them that evening at six, and there came a response regretting that a previous engagement for dinner prevented his accepting her invitation, Mrs. Gaston was quite provoked about it, and when they were at dinner she confided her disappointment to her husband and his brother.
“I called on him at the Arlington, this morning,” said Louis, “but he was out.”
“Yes, we met him,” said Mrs. Gaston. “He was driving with Lord Waring.”
Margaret felt a little throb of gratification, as her cousin made this announcement, of which she was deeply ashamed the next instant. “I am getting the most horrid ideas into my head,” she said to herself; “what a little snob I should have felt myself two months ago, to be filled with vulgar elation at the thought of Alan Decourcy being seen driving with a lord! It’s perfectly humiliating!” But all the same, the satisfaction remained.
“I wonder where he is going to dine,” Mrs. Gaston went on, presently. “He will call, of course, in acknowledgment of my invitation, and when he does, Margaret, you must ask him.”
The next morning he did call, and Mrs. Gaston and Margaret were at home to receive him. Margaret asked him, in the course of their talk, where he had dined the day before, and convicted herself a second time of snobbishness by the pleasure she felt in hearing him answer:
“At the British Legation. The minister happens to be an old acquaintance, and Waring and I were great chums at one time. By-the-way, he was, for some reason, rather struck with you, Daisy. He was with me when I met you driving yesterday, you remember. I told him you were a pet cousin of mine, and it may have been on that account that he asked me to bring him to call upon you.”
“I hope you will do so,” Mrs. Gaston said. “We should be glad to see him.”