“I suppose not,” said Grace faintly, wondering why Miss Reynolds had come to her with the news.
“I’m asking some people to dinner the night the lady lectures—Tuesday—and I want you to come. Don’t look so scared! She may not be as terrible as she writes but I’m going to invite Dr. Ridgely, and my doctor and my lawyer with the hope that they’ll all get a shock. And I want you to come; you’ve read her stuff, and I’ll count on you to help keep the talk going.”
“Why, I don’t know—” Grace began, her mind in a whirl of conjecture.
“Come! That’s a dear child. Don’t go back on me; I need your moral support. At six thirty, then? We have to dine early on account of the lecture.”
“Why, yes; Miss Reynolds,” Grace answered faintly.
“By the little pink ear of Venus!” exclaimed Irene, coming upon Grace just as Miss Reynolds left. “What’s Little Old Ready-Money done to you?”
“Nothing,” Grace replied, her mind still in confusion. “She was just asking me to dinner.”
“From your looks I’d have guessed it was a funeral,” Irene replied, and Grace, pulling herself together, hurried away to meet an approaching customer.
Of late she had given little thought to Mrs. Trenton, and it had never occurred to her in her wildest dreams that she might meet Ward’s wife in the intimate contact of a dinner table. The prospect kept her in a state of excitement all day and at times she was strongly impelled to trump up some excuse for refusing to go to Miss Reynolds’s. But her earlier curiosity as to what manner of woman it was who bore Ward Trenton’s name was rekindled by the thought of meeting her. Trenton was in Syracuse and might not reach Indianapolis for a week or more. He had said that he had not, in the letter he had written to Mrs. Trenton from St. Louis, revealed the identity of the woman who had so strongly appealed to him. Mrs. Trenton would hardly suspect that a girl she met at a dinner party was the person her husband had described only vaguely and without indicating her habitat.
Grace decided against writing Trenton of the impending meeting till it was over. Having quieted her apprehensions she began dramatizing the scene at Miss Reynolds’s table and she reread “Clues to a New Social Order” against the possibility that Mrs. Trenton’s book might become a subject of discussion at the dinner. The thought of seeing her lover’s wife in this fashion while she herself remained unknown and unsuspected laid powerful hold upon her imagination.