"I wonder whether anybody will ever want the loo-tables and Victorian sideboards back again?" Grace said; but the upholsterer had provided against that contingency by carrying everything away, to be sold for firewood, he told Sir Hector, and a very small item on the credit side of his account was supposed to represent their value in that capacity.
Then began Grace Perivale's new phase of existence—a life of luxury that was as much a revelation as the loveliness of lakes and mountains, the blue of an Italian sky. She was only twenty, and she found herself almost a personage, one of the recognized beauties, who could not move without a paragraph. Her appearance on a tiara night at the opera, her diamonds, her frocks, her parties, her poodles were written about. All the lady journalists followed her movements with unflagging pens. She could not take up a newspaper, at least among those of the frivolous order, without seeing her name in it.
She laughed, was inclined to be disgusted, and made mock of the papers, but was not actually displeased. Even in East Anglia, after a round of tennis-parties in the gardens of neighbouring squarsons, in a district where almost everybody was a parson, and most of the parsons were land-owners and rich—even in those rural scenes she had discovered that people admired her; and then Sir Hector had come with his adulation, taking fire at her beauty as at a flame, and declaring that she was the loveliest girl in England. And at twenty to be called—even by irresponsible young women—a queen of Society, has its intoxication.
She plunged into the world of pleasure. Her husband was a member of all the pleasure clubs—Hurlingham, Sandown, and the rest. Had there been a hundred he would have belonged to them all. He was popular, and had scores of friends, and if Grace had been much less attractive, she would have been well received for Sir Hector's sake.
She caught the knack of entertaining, and her parties were pronounced right from the outset. She was open to advice from old hands, but had ideas of her own, and thought out the subject thoroughly. She imparted a touch of originality to the commonest things. Her dinner-table surprised with some flower that nobody else had thought of.
"I expect to see ferns and green frogs at your next dinner," said Mr. George Howard, famous in literature and politics, ultra Liberal scion of a Liberal house, and a great admirer of Lady Perivale's. "I don't think you can find anything new—short of frogs. They must have tiny gold chains to fasten them to the épergne, like the turtle that swim about under the jetty at Nice."
It was by the pleasantness and number of her parties that Grace established herself as an entertainer, rather than by their splendour. Who can be splendid in an age of African millionaires, of Americans with inexhaustible oil-springs? She did not vie with the oil and diamond people. She left them their proper element—the colossal. Her métier was to give small parties, and to bring nice people together. She studied every invitation as carefully as a move at chess. Her queen, her knights, her bishops—she knew exactly how to place them. The knights—those choicest pieces that move anyway—were her wits and brilliant talkers, the men whom everybody wants to meet, and who always say the right thing. Her queens were of every type; first the beauties, then the clever women, then the great ladies, dowagers or otherwise, the women whose social status is in itself an attraction.
She smiled when people praised her tact and savoir faire.
"I have so little to think about," she said; "no child, no near relations. And Hector spoils me. He encourages me to care for trivial things."
"Because he cares for them himself—if you call the pleasantness of life trivial. I don't. I call it the one thing worth thinking about. I could name a score of women in London who have all the essentials of happiness and yet their houses are intolerable."