"I might as well have proposed and done with it," she thought hotly. "Phil Lorrimer needn't worry. I won't endanger his precious peace of mind again while I'm here. Previous engagement, indeed! He's afraid of my money and he makes me tired."
As a matter of fact she did Phil injustice in one particular at least. The previous engagement had been perfectly authentic. The Washington Square Players were giving that afternoon a first performance of a play which had been translated from the Russian by a friend of Phil's and he had promised to be present and had long ago invited Barb to go with him. And Barb being fully determined that Phil should never guess how things were had kept her engagement and succeeded in behaving so comradely and sisterly, which was precisely the way she had been behaving all along only more so, that her escort was allowed to continue in his state of innocence and ignorance as to things better left unknown, which was quite according to code.
But it was one of those odd coincidences that sometimes occur that Sylvia and Jeanette should have been whirling swiftly toward the park on their way home from the matinée just at the moment when Phil and Barb were transferring to the Subway at the Circle. Very much absorbed the latter appeared to be in each other's society, so much so that neither saw the limousine pass them, but Sylvia had not been so blind, and Jeanette also had taken in the scene.
"Wasn't that your little friend with Phil Lorrimer?" the latter had asked. "Somebody was telling me he goes everywhere with her. I shouldn't wonder if they were engaged, should you? They certainly looked devoted enough." So Jeanette had rattled on and never noticed that Sylvia had not answered.
That night Sylvia had gone to a big ball and worn a wonderful, sophisticated Paquin gown of sea green satin and pearls. She looked very young and lovely. The men flocked around her and she managed them all like a seasoned coquette and had three proposals during the course of the evening. Of course it was perfectly well known that she was an heiress as well as a beauty, so the proposers was not so romantically rash as might have been thought.
And from that time on Sylvia "went the pace" as madly as Jeanette herself, without pause or rest. After that one supper party Barb was never able to capture her friend again, her engagements piled up so fast and high. It looked as if Suzanne's prophecy about the "labyrinth" were being fulfilled. As for Phil, never once was he able to see her again. She was always out when he called or telephoned and always had previous engagements when he tried to get her for the theater or a concert. She was as invisible, so far as he was concerned, as if some fairy's wand had drawn a magic circle about her, a fact which made him burrow deeper than ever in his work and made him look a little older and grimmer than his twenty-five years warranted.
CHAPTER XV
THE CITY AND SYLVIA
Sylvia had supposed herself sufficiently grown up and wise and modern when she came to the city but she had not been there a week before she knew that she had been a veritable innocent, an infant in swaddling clothes, so to speak. Here was life, of a sort, with a vengeance.
In Jeanette's circle, Sylvia saw Mammon worship executed on so prodigious a scale and with such sacrificial ardor it fairly took her breath away. Everything was of the superlative degree. Sheer wealth, sheer elaboration, sheer success, sheer bigness, sheer speed, were all that counted it seemed. And in the mêlée the old-fashioned virtues, spiritual values, ideals, were somehow either dimmed beyond recognition or totally extinguished. Love showed itself chiefly in the guise of passion, often frankly illicit, and in lust frequently but thinly veiled. The motley throng of young-old men and old-young men who paid court to herself were obviously actuated by one of two motives or a combination of the two, the impulse of passion, or the impulse of avarice. Both points of view Sylvia loathed and thought degrading to herself as well as the men who held them. Nearly all of the group of more or less importunate suitors who thronged about her she frankly despised. The men she might have liked and respected did not come near her, much less enter the lists. No doubt they classed her with the other women with whom she appeared, women butterfly clad, butterfly souled, obviously unfit for the serious purposes of life. Sylvia did not wonder that the real men kept away. They showed their realness by so doing she thought.