Poor Langley saw through Maud perfectly, in spite of all her sweetness. But he had to admit that Maud had a case. He smoked a perfunctory cigar with Harvey and went home. Maud became much more sympathetic with Horatia after that visit. Her own antagonism to Langley personally had vanished or been metamorphosed into excitement at her daring in braving such a very irregular, fine-looking and interesting person as Jim. She had lost all animosity at the end of his call and Horatia, who had consented to bring Langley there only after much begging from Maud, had great fun in seeing her sister thaw and finally in watching Langley try to avoid Maud’s persistent invitations. But she had even more amusement when her sister heard that Mrs. Hubbell had reappeared in the city. She broke the news to Horatia with a great air of imparting necessary scandal and was completely filled with horror when Horatia confessed not only to previous knowledge of Maud’s information but also to an acquaintanceship with Mrs. Hubbell.
She offered to take Maud to call but Maud was at the point where she could bear no more shocking.
“It’s dreadful and dangerous,” she told Horatia. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re getting into. What does the creature look like?”
Horatia told her with some enthusiasm. She had somehow come to see a good deal of Rose Hubbell. It was not that she particularly wanted to and Langley had once or twice rather gravely protested. But there was a timeliness, a psychological correctness about Mrs. Hubbell’s invitations that made them very hard to refuse. She destroyed your alibis, too, before she asked you to do something. And then it was good fun for Horatia and really did provide varied amusement for her. Mrs. Hubbell’s settled occupation was having a good time and being modern. Like so many other women she had preëmpted the right to call her kind of living perfectly modern. Grace did the same thing—Horatia did the same thing. And each of them was using the phrase modernism to express satisfaction with the plan of her own existence. Mrs. Hubbell so justified her deviations from the paths orderly people travel, Grace for the same reason as well as to excuse her fashion of intellectualizing all enthusiasms and apparently all emotions out of her life, and Horatia to define the spirit of adventure and desire to explore the depths of life which animated her. Each of them had a different mold which she called modernism and each of them poured her actions into her own mold, delighted to see that they hardened into the shape of the vessel.
Horatia was less conscious than the other two. She was trying their ways, learning their precepts of life and ways of living. She liked things about each of them—Grace’s absorption in her work and Mrs. Hubbell’s more decorative social skill. Mrs. Hubbell knew how to arrange, start off and keep up a dinner party, and she danced with amazing grace and beauty. Horatia danced too, of course, vigorously, healthily, accurately—but the dancing of Rose Hubbell was a gift. “She is not a partner but an inspiration,” said one of the enthusiasts, and Horatia agreed. She guided a bad partner and brought out the best in a mediocre one, but with Jim Langley she moved as if they were strung to one rhythm. There were many opportunities for Horatia to see them together. Mrs. Hubbell arranged parties at country inns and hotels, at all kinds of public places which Horatia had never dreamed of attending, and which she had always regarded as somewhat dubious. But she found them, on the surface at least, innocuous enough places where people spent an enormous amount for eating and drinking, and committed many sins of gluttony and bad taste, but no other serious ones. They danced unpleasantly sometimes and they might be noisy, but on the whole they were passable people, as full of the lesser virtues as were Maud’s friends. They had a fascination about them, too. They were an unanchored lot, with no regularity even in their social intercourse. Extremely well-dressed, often beautiful, the women gave no impression of having antecedents or backgrounds. They emerged from obscurity into the dazzling glare of a hotel ballroom. They were seemingly respectable, extravagant, careless, picking at the surface of life and to some extent they typified a phase of the era—its brilliant, shop-window phase.
Maud’s friends were residents and taxpayers. They had a proper scorn of the transient and held aloof. Yet, to a certain extent, they dovetailed with the other group. The men of Maud’s group were to be seen in hotels as well as at private dinner parties, mostly without their wives in the hotels, if they were married. And once Horatia saw Anthony Wentworth at the Orient.
He was with a party of men and girls at the next table. The party had come in late and Horatia had not seen Anthony until she was conscious of his bow. Then she remembered who he was and as she smiled at him she had a feeling of meeting someone of her own kind;—a sudden thought and one she indignantly refused to harbor, as, blaming him as if he had suggested it, she turned from her smile to him to plunge into conversation with a thin little man who was at her right—a thin, awkward, rich little man.
The little man danced badly. It irritated Horatia to feel ashamed of him in front of Wentworth, but she hoped that Anthony knew enough about dancing to realize that it was not her fault that she looked absurd. Why did the little man jump about so? She pressed her hand on his shoulder to steady him and then jumped away in disgust as she felt her hand squeezed in misunderstanding. They bumped into another couple and stopped. It was Anthony. He smiled and stopped too.
The girl with whom he was dancing was of Horatia’s kind too.
“So you do play sometimes, Miss Grant?” asked Wentworth.