As it had been at Saratoga, so it was at Newport. Urged on by Mrs. Cameron and Bell, who enjoyed her notoriety, Katy plunged into the mad excitement of dancing and driving and coqueting, until Wilford himself became uneasy, locking her once in her room, where she was sleeping after dinner, and conveniently forgetting to release her until after the departure at evening of some young men from Cambridge, whose attentions to the Ocean House belle had been more strongly marked than was altogether agreeable to him. Of course it was a mistake—the locking of the door—and a great oversight in him not to have remembered it sooner, he said to Katy, by way of apology; and Katy, with no suspicion of the truth, laughed merrily at the joke, repeating it downstairs to the old dowagers, who shrugged their shoulders meaningly and whispered to each other that it might be well if more young wives were locked into their rooms and thus kept out of mischief.
Though flattered, caressed, and admired, Katy was not doing herself much credit at Newport; but save Wilford, there was no one to raise a warning voice, until Mark Ray came down for a few days’ respite from the heated city, where he had spent the entire summer, taking charge of the business which belonged as much to Wilford as to himself. But Wilford had a wife; it was more necessary that he should leave, Mark had argued; his time would come by and by. And so he had remained at home until the last of August, when he appeared suddenly at the Ocean House one night when Katy, in her airy robes and child-like simplicity, was breaking hearts by the score. Like others, Mark was charmed, and not a little proud for Katy’s sake, to see her thus appreciated; but when one day’s experience had shown him more, and given him a look behind the scenes, he trembled for her, knowing how hard it would be for her to come out of that sea of dissipation as pure and spotless as she went in.
“If I were her brother I would warn her that her present career is not one upon which she will look back with pleasure when the excitement is over,” he said to himself; “but if Wilford is satisfied it is not for me to interfere. It is surely nothing to me what Katy Cameron does,” he kept repeating to himself; but as often as he said it there came up before him a pale, anxious face, shaded with Helen Lennox’s bands of hair, and Helen Lennox’s voice whispered to him: “Save Katy, for my sake,” and so next day, when Mark found himself alone with Katy, while most of the guests were at the beach, he questioned her of her life at Saratoga and Newport, and gradually, as he talked, there crept into Katy’s heart a suspicion that he was not pleased with her account, or with what he had seen of her since his arrival.
For a moment Katy was indignant, but when he said to her kindly: “Would Helen be pleased?” her tears started at once, and she attempted an excuse for her weak folly, accusing Sybil Grandon as the first cause of the ambition for which she hated herself.
“She had been held up as my pattern,” she said, half bitterly, and forgetting to whom she was talking—“she, the one whom I was to imitate; and when I found that I could go beyond her, I yielded to the temptation, and exulted to see how far she was left behind. Besides that,” she continued, “is it no gratification, think you, to let Wilford’s proud mother and sister see the poor country girl, whom ordinarily they would despise, stand where they cannot come, and even dictate to them if she chooses so to do? I know it is wrong—I know it is wicked—but I like the excitement, and so long as I am with these people I shall never be any better. Mark Ray, you don’t know what it is to be surrounded by a set who care for nothing but fashion and display, and how they may outdo each other. I hate New York society. There is nothing there but husks.”
Katy’s tears had ceased, and on her white face there was a new look of womanhood, as if in that outburst she had changed, and would never again be just what she was before.
“Say,” she continued, “do you like New York society?”
“Not always—not wholly,” Mark answered; “and still you misjudge it greatly, for all are not like the people you describe. Your husband’s family represent one extreme, while there are others equally high in the social scale who do not make fashion the rule of their lives—sensible, cultivated, intellectual people, of whose acquaintance one might be glad—people whom I fancy your sister Helen would enjoy. I have only met her twice, but my impression is that she would not find New York distasteful.”
Mark did not know why he had dragged Helen into that conversation, unless it were that she seemed very near to him as he talked with Katy, who replied:
“Yes, Helen finds good in all. She sees differently from what I do, and I wish so much that she was here.”