“No, don’t touch the strings of your poke, and leave your bodice alone. That creamy lace simply looks confidential and clinging, and not a bit mussy like mine.”
“I think I will go to the picture gallery as soon as we have made our bows to Mrs. Parks, and settle there,” said Brooke, “so that I can see everything before the concert is over. Then you will know where to find me. To-day I feel more like looking than listening,” she added, when Lucy was silenced a moment by holding half a dozen jewelled stick pins between her lips, as she rearranged the folds of an expensive draped lace bodice that, in spite of the beauty of the fabric, seemed out of key and mussy, the severe and tailor-made being better adapted to her.
For a few moments the two lingered in one of the alcoves of the dressing room, looking for familiar faces among the arrivals.
“By the way, I suppose Mr. Fenton is coming in later with the other down-town men?” said Brooke. “If so, you needn’t look me up at all.”
“Dick may be coming, though I doubt it, but it will not be to meet me. See here, goosie,” said Lucy, half avoiding her friend’s eyes, “I might as well tell you now as any other time. Dick and I have agreed to disagree. It happened last Sunday, and I’d have told you before, only you take all such things so seriously.”
“What is the matter; has he changed?”
“No, he has not, that is half the trouble. He has stayed quite too much the same; I only wonder that I could have endured it for the eight months it has lasted. You see, he was perfectly satisfied with himself as he was, and that leaves no room for improvement. Of course everybody knows, at the pace the world’s rolling along, if you don’t go ahead, you slide back! I tend to balk and jump the traces enough myself when it comes to hills, Heaven knows, and if my mate in harness can’t pull true on an up grade, where shall we be at? Dick kept along on the level good naturedly, I’ll say that for him, yet it was because I was my father’s daughter, not because I’m myself. Being a young broker, he thought it a good thing to have a father-in-law with unlimited ‘pointers’ in every wag of his chin (poor chap, he hasn’t yet realized that these things mostly point both ways), and he was serenely content! As for me, I felt as if I should go wild,—no conversation except the eternal money market. I said so,—and more besides!
“He was very nice about it,—daddy really seemed relieved,—and—well, it’s all over, though his mother did glower at me at first when I met her on the avenue yesterday, but she decided to bow.”
“Oh, Lucy, why are you so impetuous? When you told me of the engagement, you said—”
“Now listen, Brooke Lawton, and hear me swear one thing: money in one’s pocket is a blessing, but continually dinned into one’s ears it’s the other thing. If ever I marry any one, he must not be in this sickening money business; he must do something different, if it’s only drawing pictures on the sidewalk with chalk held between his toes, like the armless sailor in Union Square, though, come to think of it, I’d rather he’d have arms!