So she gave dinner parties to people whom she knew and liked and other dinner parties to people who were useful to her husband, and enjoyed her progress along the reasonable way of luxury and importance. The things Horatia talked about, odd things picked up in her newspaper office, of a new spirit in the world, of the relentless advance of the hordes of workers, bothered her not at all. She knew that servants were increasingly hard to get and to keep “in their place” and that there were “labor troubles” in some of the manufactories managed by people whom she knew and that “everybody was striking.” But she knew too that Harvey placed the responsibility on the war for much of the trouble, and she had no doubt that, the war being over, those little matters would adjust and allow the right people to run things as they should be run. Horatia talked a great deal but Maud had no doubts about her sister’s ultimate destiny. Somewhere along the line, and not too far along, she meant to marry Horatia to some desirable man. She had discovered that Horatia was an asset at a dinner party just as she was a blight at a bridge. She was one person when she was making inexcusable and enraging blunders at a bridge-table and another when she appeared at a tea, able and willing to talk of the newest local interest or problem to important and serious-minded ladies or when, in some queer effective dinner-dress, she sat with her bright, grave face turned in constant interest to the man beside her.
“Horatia plays up to men awfully well,” Maud told her husband. And was wholly wrong. Horatia was too interested to play up to anyone, man or woman. She had come from her University into a world vastly more stimulating than she had imagined. It was, as Langley had told her, a world tired and worn by war, a world in vast upheaval over the division of material things, but through the weariness and worn places relentless new life, undiscouraged energies were already pushing their way. Since the war young people had come to feel their power and their indispensability; young plans for life and ways of life, less greedy than the old ones, pushed themselves forward, sure that they could not fail as deplorably as the old systems had done. Women were no longer tremulous about their possibilities; an under-supply of men had forced them out of their dependencies and they faced life more sturdily. Men, shocked into the realization that death comes devastatingly to whole generations of the young, faced life more sturdily too, though temporarily with less responsibility, with more desire for immediate pleasures, for immediate achievements, and with an undertone of mental insecurity. The whole world seemed to feel unstable and ready for experiments, any experiments. That was the world which Horatia had found and it mated badly with Maud’s. Maud’s world, Maud’s friends, lived by the rules laid down by old-fashioned success and decency. They held to the old order but not to the spirit of the old order. The spirit of the old order had been far-reaching, far-seeking, anxious to perpetuate its own ideas and to raise generation after generation like itself. But Maud and Harvey had no thought of grandchildren or of the future of their own ideas. Their ideas reached not much farther than the brick mansion and the house in California.
Through their circles and through her own Horatia came and went and everywhere she touched life and tingled with the contact, unconscious that it was she herself who was electric. Langley watched her as she dashed in and out of his office and tried not to do so and on his failure cursed himself under his breath for a doddering fool and worked harder than ever.
He sent Horatia home at five o’clock on the afternoon of the election, for they had put out a special edition the day before and he noticed the unnatural flush of her cheeks.
“Come back tonight if you like,” he said. “You can answer the telephones after the returns begin to come in. But there’ll be nothing before ten.”
Horatia went obediently. At the apartment she found an urgent message from Maud. Someone had failed her and would Horatia come to dinner? Horatia called her to beg off and yielded. Maud was very serious about her dinner parties and this one, it appeared, was especially important.
“You can go at ten, if you have to. But don’t leave me with an unbalanced table. There’d be two men sitting next each other. Please.”
Horatia promised and hung up the receiver, smiling a little at the enormity of two men sitting next each other. But after all it gave her something to do and she was not sorry.
Harvey greeted her admiringly in the living-room.
“How are politics?”