The secretary named an insignificant board of which Mr. Kidder was a member. His grandmother rapidly instanced a dozen other names, and repeated her question. In most cases the young man had to confess his ignorance of their claims.
"So," she commented in the end; "so. And I, whose people have helped govern this community since there was a colony to govern, am beyond the pale! But who was Peter Stuyvesant beside Mrs. Tommy Kidder's husband? Nobody. Who was Abraham de Peyster? who was Gerardus Beekman? who was Rip Van Dam? And the Schuylers, Livingstons, and Van Rensselaers? All nobodies. My dear child, what lunatic in the Beverwyck Club suggested this official classification, which even the Archangel Michael could not carry out?"
Her grandson, with no friendly recollections, named the judge.
"The silly old man!" exclaimed Mrs. Van Dam. "And who inspired him?"
He cheerfully told her, with the added detail that Mrs. Shelby and the judge had subsequently gone over the invitation list together. She was silent for a time, and then dismissed him. Alone with her thoughts, she elaborated a countermine, whose energy was specially directed against the Beverwyck Club, though she had no objection to hoisting the governor's wife in the explosion, albeit she refused to consider her the real antagonist. The true offender was the exclusive organization which had prostituted itself to such ignoble influence.
Within an hour of her grandson's departure Mrs. Teunis Van Dam despatched an invitation of her own. The Beverwyck Club reception was scheduled to run its formal course from nine to eleven o'clock; Mrs. Van Dam asked the governor and his lady to dine with her on the same evening at the hour of eight.
All hinged now on the personal equation of Cora Shelby, whose vagaries the old lady owned herself quite unable to forecast. Nor in this respect was Cora herself a much wiser prophet. Her first instinct, mixed with wonder, was to decline, and she held to this opinion the better part of an hour. Yet before the impulse could stiffen into resolution, it met the neutralizing influence of the old town, which, partly through the military secretary, partly through the scoffing Ludlow, she had unwittingly assimilated. By these teachings she had learned the flattering, almost royal, significance of Mrs. Teunis Van Dam's dinner invitations. She was seized afresh by a curiosity to observe how they did things in Quality Row, and became of two minds forthwith. Appointed for the same evening as the club reception, the dinner had, moreover, the look of a peace overture, a concession to her power, even an admission of defeat, which was soothing. She could hardly present the matter to Shelby in this light, as she had withheld all mention of the Ludlow business from his ear; but with a generosity which astonished herself, she dwelt on Mrs. Teunis Van Dam's undoubted prestige, and ended by advising acceptance.
Shelby, preoccupied with an appeal for the pardon of a consumptive forger, mechanically agreed.
"Sooner or later we'd have had to endure both functions," he said. "It is time saved to pack them into one evening."
Cora bridled. It was a prodigious affair for her that he took so indifferently.