The Tracy diamonds

by Mary Jane Holmes

“Yes, mamma, but not here; let’s wait till we get home and are tired and glad to go into some poky little hole,” her daughter Helen said, when it was suggested to her that they take a less expensive suite of rooms in Paris than they were looking at.

In Florence, where they had spent most of the winter, they had occupied a handsome villa and entertained and been entertained on a grand scale. Horses and carriages and servants in livery had been at their command without stint, and Helen had been the belle of the season. Wherever she went she had taken precedence as the beautiful American to whom both her own countrymen and foreigners paid tribute. If a perfect form and features and brilliant complexion constitute beauty, she was pre-eminently beautiful, with the added charm of a seeming unconsciousness of her beauty. But it was only seeming. She knew her own value perfectly, and had spent much time in cultivating that naturalness and sweetness of manner which seldom failed when its object was to win either attention, admiration or love. Her cousin Alice said of her that a smile or a wink from her eyes would bring any man to her feet, no matter how callous he might be to another lady’s charms. To be surrounded by a crowd of young men, each one of whom was struggling for a chance to propose, while she skillfully kept him at bay, was a pastime in which she delighted, and in which she had been tolerably successful. At twenty-two she had received twenty offers, and could count at least twenty more who would have proposed had she given them a chance. She had their names in a blue and gold book which she called her “Blue Book.” Those who had proposed were in one column, and those who wanted to in another, with certain marks against them indicative of their standing in her estimation and the possibility of her winking them back if the fancy took her. There was also a third column with a few names of those whom she did not know, and whom she greatly desired to know. Heading this list was “Craig Mason, Boston; old family; woman hater; very aristocratic and reserved, and almost too refined to enjoy himself; does not wish to know me; does not like my style. Should very much like a chance to wink at him, as Alice expresses it.”

This entry was made the year before when she was at Saratoga, and nearly every young man from the different hotels had called upon her except Craig. He had been asked to do so by a friend, and had replied: “No, thanks; Miss Tracy is not my style.”

This in due time was reported to her, and although she gave no sign, it rankled deeply. She made no effort to meet him after that, and only saw him driving his famous horse, Dido, with his mother, who, she had heard, was very proud of her position as Mrs. Mason, and very watchful lest her son should make a mesalliance, or indeed an alliance of any kind. With her mother she was rather tired of travel. She had had a good deal of dissipation in Florence and Paris and London; had added a few names to her blue book, and had come home heart whole and exceedingly glad to be there.

“If it were the thing to do, and I hadn’t so many new dresses to show, I’d rather stay here all summer than go dragging around to the same places, stopping at the same hotels and meeting the same people, who say the same tiresome things,” she said to her mother as they were taking their breakfast at home after their return from abroad.

In this state of mind it was easier than it was in Europe for her to fall in with her mother’s proposal that they find some quiet place in which to spend a few weeks.

“If it is very dull we can leave at any time, and I may accept Mr. Prescott yet; I haven’t quite decided,” she said, as she sipped her chocolate, while her mother looked over the papers in quest of advertisements.

Mr. Prescott was the last man Helen had refused, but she had done it in such a way that she felt sure a word from her would bring him back. She always had some one on the leash in this way, marked in her book with a big interrogation, “so as to run no risk of being an old maid,” she said to her cousin Alice, who was her confidant in her love affairs, and knew the three sets of men whose names were in her “Blue Book” as possibles and impossibles.

“If you are going to some out of the way place, let it be very much out of the way, where there is no danger of seeing people, or being made love to. I’m so tired of it, and I really begin to think it is wicked. Alice says it is. Dear little chick; I don’t suppose any one ever made love to her. Strange, too, when she is so pretty and sweet.”

“And poor,” Mrs. Tracy added, while Helen continued: “I don’t believe that would make any difference with me. I could wink ’em up if I hadn’t a dollar. I’d like to pose once as a penniless maiden and see.”