“And what did Madam say to that?” I asked.
“Oh, her pride kept the tears back; they both said nothing and signed the papers; but I know that she must think me a hateful, close-fisted Yankee, with no conception of granting a favor graciously and without cruelly wounding the recipient’s feelings.”
We saw very little of the Lawrences after this. It was understood that little Gladys’s health required country air, and a cottage out of town was engaged. The children were not sent to school, but kept up French and read history and literature at home with their mamma, and although they would have found it difficult to bound Missouri or do an example in long division, they could talk glibly of Louis XI. and the Cid.
Whether a beneficial reform was wrought in the domestic economy of the family, I never knew, and I think Mildred had her doubts, though she was not called upon to pay any more debts.
We heard incidentally that the General’s cigar bills and physician’s fees had not decreased, and that his last work on the Philosophy of the Greek Tragedians had received unqualified praise from Professor Curtius.
This little episode was only one of the many which marked our brief stay in New York, and gave me an opportunity to study the many-sided character of my friend. She had some aristocratic acquaintances in the city who were only too happy to lionize her, and she was soon overwhelmed with invitations to lunch parties, theatre parties, et cetera, in which I was also kindly included.
“You must go, dear; I want some one to back me up,” she used to say at first. “I have courage enough to go into a pulpit and preach a sermon, or to go down into the slums alone, or to do a thousand things which would make most girls horrified, but I fairly shake in my shoes when I have to be the target of the eyes of all these society women and dollar-hunters. I know they would not care a jot for me were it not for my money, and I cannot help thinking of it all the time. I feel suspicious of every one in a way that makes me blush.
“I can’t talk society small talk; I never could. I wonder how people manage to do it and wax so eloquent over nothing,” she once said. “But I suppose I must try to learn how,” she added, with a comical wry face.
“Why try to learn, why not act your natural self?” I protested, for I had quietly observed that Mildred’s simple and unaffected bearing and transparent sincerity had proved far more attractive in society than the persiflage and repartee of more brilliant women, though I knew that she herself felt conscious of shyness and a sense that she was out of her proper element.
“Why not act my natural self?” repeated Mildred. “Because, my dear, I like to be liked, and my natural, unconventional self would lead me to talk of all sorts of things which society would not like. If I talked as much as I wished to on the subjects that interest me most, I should be voted a Boston bore, a woman with a mission, with hobbies, with theories,—altogether a very unlikable person aside from my ducats.”