“Never mind!” Margaret dropped the chain, her mood changing. “I really didn’t want to know,” she said with a shrug, “why should I? I don’t know why I asked. I’ll take the gold cigarette-case, if you can get the monogram off, and the tea-pot. Bring them over and I’ll send the check.”
The man bowed and rubbed his hands. He knew Margaret very well and profited largely by her careless and profuse use of money. Knowing the world too, as he did, and the people in it, he thought her more wretched than the girl who had traded the bracelet, or the owner of the gold cigarette-case who, he happened to know, had since shot himself and now lay in an unmarked grave. Daddy Lerwick, indeed, knew more than was good for him but, perhaps, not more than many others who stand thus at the gateway between the upper stratum of gilded pleasure and the lower stratum of sordid misery, and receive the tolls!
Meanwhile, unconscious of his eyes and certainly proudly disdainful of his thoughts, the society beauty, the Cabinet minister’s wife, trailed through the dingy shop and passed out by the side door, which Lerwick opened for her, to the stairs of Allestree’s studio. As she ascended, the cloud which had rested on her face slightly cleared and her expression grew more decisive; the desolate misery of her heart had taken a more concrete form, she had arrived at last at a resolution. She had reached a point where she must resist or die. Her bruised heart throbbed with continuous pain and she was proudly aware that she was losing all—losing it, too, without an apparent struggle. She, Margaret, who had always borne herself proudly and defiantly to the world, was she to be a mendicant asking the alms of love and asking it in vain?
She swept on, crossed the landing under Aunt Hannah’s accustomed window, and thrusting aside the portière entered upon a tableau of the artist and his two new clients, Mrs. and Miss Vermilion, and her enemy, Mrs. Wingfield. The two older women stout, tightly laced, gorgeously over-dressed, the younger, slender and well done by the best French art and with that indescribable air of disdain which, commonly assumed by the parvenu to be the sign manual of birth and breeding, might be called the bar sinister of society. At the sight of Margaret, however, she unbent with an alacrity which was as amazing as it was sudden.
“Dear Mrs. White,” she chirped, “do come and advise me; mamma wants me painted, and really I can’t choose a pose! I saw a picture of the Duchess of Leinster which was lovely, but Mr. Allestree says he never copies even attitudes! Isn’t it confusing?”
Margaret shrugged one shoulder and held out two fingers to the elder women. “Try Aphrodite rising from the sea,” she suggested with a provoking drawl, “I dare say Bobby can do waves, he’s admirable on flesh tints.”
The girl colored furiously and bit her lip. It was impossible to know where to meet Mrs. White, she reflected, without daring to provoke another catastrophe by retaliation.
But Mrs. Wingfield had felt the sting of Margaret’s rudeness too often. She moved to the door with the rustle of silk draperies. “I hear Mr. Fox is to marry Miss Temple,” she said pointedly, looking Margaret full in the face.
“And I heard that Mr. Wingfield was to get the mission to Brazil,” retorted Margaret unmoved.
Mrs. Wingfield’s cheek crimsoned and the feathers on her bonnet trembled. “Nothing of the sort! You don’t mean to tell me you heard that?”