“Well,” went on Trix, “I maintain that that man is every bit as well worth knowing afterwards,—after he has lost his voice. And even if he’d never been able to give expression to himself by singing, he might have been just as well worth knowing. But the world never looks for inside things, but only for external things that make a show. So if Mrs. B. hasn’t an atom of anything congenial to me in her composition, but has a magnificent house and heaps of money, it’s quite right and fitting I should know her, so people would say, and encourage me to do so. But it’s against all the conventions that I should be friendly with little Miss F. who lives over the tobacconist’s at the corner of such and such a street, though she is thoroughly congenial to me, and I love her plucky and cheery outlook on life.” She stopped.
“Go on,” encouraged Doctor Hilary.
“Well,” laughed Trix, “take a more extreme case. Sir A. C. is—well, not a bad man, but not the least the kind of man I care about, but he may take me in to dinner, and, on the strength of that brief acquaintance, to a theatre if he wants, provided I have some other woman with me as a sort of chaperon, and he can talk to me by the hour, and that all on account of his money and title. Mr. Z. is a really white man, but he’s a ‘come-down,’ through no fault of his own, and a bus-conductor. I happen to have spoken to him once or twice; and like him. But I mightn’t even walk for half an hour with him in the park, if I’d fifty authorized chaperons attending on me. That’s what I mean about conventions that are conventions for their own sake.” She stopped again.
“And what do you suggest as a remedy?” asked Father Dormer, smiling.
“There isn’t one,” sighed Trix. “At least not one you can apply universally. Everybody must just apply it for themselves, and not exactly by defying conventions, but by treating them as simply non-existent.”
The Duchessa made a little movement in the moonlight.
“Which,” she said quietly, “comes to exactly the same thing as defying them, and it won’t work.”
“Why not?” demanded Trix.
“You’d find yourself curiously lonely after a time if you did.”
“You mean my friends—no, my acquaintances—would desert me?”