“You are the same impulsive Kitty!” she said affectionately. “I have had a quiet, busy, happy life with Arthur and the children. Three babies in five years do not give a housekeeper much time for anything but domestic duties.”
“I should think not, indeed!” The shiver of shoulders was well-executed, the heavenward cast of eyes and hands dramatic. “I wonder you live to tell it! One child in six years has been enough to unsettle my wits. Now that you are once more within my reach (Oh, you darling!) we must make up for lost time and see a great deal of each other! Do you ever sing nowadays? Or have you let your music go to the dogs? I suppose so, if Providence has interfered to save your wild-rose complexion. I was raving to Jack this morning over the voice you used to have, and your genius for theatricals and all that. ‘Indeed,’ said I, ‘there was nothing that girl couldn’t do.’ To think of wasting such an organ, or wearing it thin in crooning nursery ditties.”
Mrs. Cornell laughed a soft, merry burst of amusement, at which the other eyed her curiously.
“You behave less like an exhumed corpse than anybody could imagine who knew of your five years in Brooklyn, and the three younglings. What amuses you?”
“Nothing, except your determination to regard me as dead, buried, and resurrected. So far from giving up my music, I have practiced more steadily than if I had spent more evenings abroad. You know I studied vocal and instrumental music with the intention of making it my profession. Arthur agrees with me that what is once learned should never be lost. Then, when my little girls are ready to be taught, I can instruct them myself. We had a number of musical friends in Brooklyn, and a pleasant circle of acquaintances. We have not lived in—Hoboken,” cried the hostess in whimsical vexation. “I don’t see why New Yorkers always talk of Brooklyn as if it were as far off and as much a terra incognita as the moon. We are inhabitants of the same planet as yourselves.”
The visitor patted the back of her companion’s hand, soothingly. “You are a New Yorker now—one of us!” she purred. “In six months you would as soon cross the Styx as the East River, even on that overgrown, preposterous Bridge the Brooklynites give themselves such airs over. How prettily settled you are!” staring, rather than glancing about the apartment. “These are nice drawing rooms and furnished in excellent taste.”
Mrs. Cornell had regarded them as “parlors,” but her first concession to Mrs. Hitt’s better knowledge was to look accustomed to the new term. She fought down with equal success the impulse to classify Kitty’s open admiration with the amiable patronage of which Brooklyn people are inclined to suspect New Yorkers. She plumed herself modestly upon her taste in house-furnishing and upon the ability to make cheap things look as if they had cost a good deal. She had withheld the fact of the change of residence from metropolitan acquaintances until her house was in order that might defy unfavorable criticism. It was kind in Kitty to run in so unceremoniously and to be glad of the chance to renew their early intimacy. In spite of Arthur and the children, she had begun to be somewhat homesick in the great whirling world about her.
“Like a chip in the Atlantic Ocean!” Thus she had described her sensations to her husband that very morning. “I suppose I shall get used to it after a while, especially as Brooklyn and New York are, to all intents and purposes, one and the same city.”
She asserted it stoutly, knowing all the while that Moscow and New Orleans were as nearly homogeneous.
Yes! Kitty was heartily welcome to the stranger in an unknown territory. Mrs. Hitt was not intellectual, and judged by standards Arthur Cornell’s wife had come to revere sincerely, she was not especially refined in speech and bearing. Or were Susie’s tastes too quiet and her ideas old-fashioned, that her interlocutor’s crisp sayings sounded pert, and the bright brown eyes and fixed flush upon the cheekbones were artificially aggressive? Her former chum had always been warm-hearted, if inconveniently outspoken. And she was a New Yorker, and fashionable. Susie’s cherished ambition, unavowed even to Arthur while it was expedient for them to live simply, was to be fashionable, brilliant, and courted—a member in good and regular standing in the Society of which Mrs. Sherwood lectured, and Ellen Olney Kirk wrote, and to which Jenkyns Knickerbocker was au fait. A certain something that was not air or tone, deportment or attire, and yet partook of all these as pot-pourri of rose-breath, spices, and perfumed oils—marked Kitty Hitt as an habituée of the charmed Reserve. She was not, perhaps, one of the Four Hundred selected from the Upper Ten Thousand by processes as arbitrary, to human judgment, as those by which Gideon’s three hundred were picked out from the hosts of Israel. Susie was no simpleton, albeit ambitious. Mr. Hitt was a stockbroker; hence manifestly in the line of promotion, but there were degrees of elevation upon even Olympus. Her imagination durst not lift eyes to the cloud-wreathed summit where chief gods held revel, guarded from vulgar intrusion by Gabriel Macallister. The climate and manner of life a few leagues lower down would, as she felt, suit her better than the rarified atmosphere of the extremest heights. She had always meant to climb, and successfully, when time and opportunity should serve. From the moment the passage of the river was determined upon as a business necessity, she felt intuitively that both of these were near.