“It’s because she is Miss Reynolds that she can do as she pleases,” replied Mrs. Durland conciliatingly. “And as she was asked by a friend to show some courtesy to Mrs. Trenton, she isn’t doing any more than any one else would do in the same circumstances. As I said when Grace first spoke of meeting Mr. Trenton, his wife’s a dangerous woman. It’s in her power to do a great deal of mischief in the world. I don’t believe Miss Reynolds has any patience with Mrs. Trenton’s ideas, and it can’t do Grace any harm to meet her. You ought to be glad, Ethel, that Miss Reynolds feels that Grace would fit into a select party like that.”
“I’ll be surprised if Dr. Ridgely goes to the dinner,” replied Ethel. “That woman is fighting everything the church stands for. If I had my way she wouldn’t be allowed to speak here.”
“That’s no joke!” replied Grace good-naturedly. “But there are people, you know, who are not afraid of hearing radical ideas—a few broad-minded people who think it safer to let the cranks talk out in the open than to drive them into a cellar to touch off the gentle bomb.”
“Many people feel just that way, Ethel,” said Mrs. Durland.
Mrs. Durland’s disapproval of Mrs. Trenton and the ideas identified with that lady’s name was much softened by the fact that Grace was to be included in a formal dinner which Miss Reynolds had undoubtedly arranged with care. And while Mary Graham Trenton might entertain and preach the most shocking ideas she was nevertheless one of the best known and most discussed women in America, besides being the inheritor of wealth and social position. Miss Reynolds’s marked liking for Grace afforded Mrs. Durland a satisfaction not wholly attributable to veneration for Miss Reynolds’s money or unassailable position as a member of a pioneer Indianapolis family. Grace’s unaccountable ways and her assertions of independence often brought alarm and dismay to the mother’s heart; but Grace was indubitably lovely to look at and the fine spirit in which she had accepted and met the curtailment of her course at the university excused many things. Grace had wits and she would go far, but the traveling would have to be on broad highways of her own choosing. It was not without twinges of heartache that Mrs. Durland realized that this dark-eyed daughter was peculiarly a child of the new order; that not by prayer, threat or cajolery could she be made to walk in old paths or heed the old admonitions. But there had been Morleys who were independent and forthright and Miss Reynolds’s invitation implied a recognition of Grace as a well-bred and intelligent girl.
Mrs. Durland, busily sewing, had been giving Grace such information as she possessed about the Sanderses, who were to be of Miss Reynolds’s company. Hardly less than the sons and daughters of Virginia and Kentucky, Mrs. Durland was possessed of a vast amount of lore touching the families of her native state. Mrs. Sanders was a Shelton of the old Bartholomew County family of that name. Some Shelton had once been engaged in business with a Morley who was a second cousin of Mrs. Durland. It was a tannery she thought, though it might have been a brickyard. And Sanders’s father had been a prominent citizen somewhere on the lower Wabash and had married into the Alston family of Vanderburgh County. Grace lent a sympathetic ear to this recital of ancient Hoosier history chiefly because her mother found so great a pleasure in reciting it. It was the cruelest of ironies that her mother, with all her adoration of the State and its traditions and her constant recurrence to the past glories of the Morleys, lived a life of self-denial apart from contemporaries capable of sharing her pride and pleasure in the old times.
The talk had wandered far from Grace’s dinner engagement when Ethel, who had been quietly plying her needle, took advantage of a lull to switch it back.
“I suppose you won’t feel quite like a stranger with Mrs. Trenton,” she suggested. “Mr. Trenton has no doubt told his wife of his acquaintance with you.”
“No doubt he has,” Grace replied calmly. “In fact he told me he had written her about me.”
This was not wholly candid; Trenton had only said that he had written to his wife, pursuant to an understanding between them, that he had met a girl who greatly interested him. But Ethel’s remark occasioned Grace a moment of discomfort. In her last meeting with Trenton his wife had not been mentioned, but it was possible that by now he had made a complete confession of his unfaithfulness. Irene Kirby had frequently commented upon Trenton’s frankness; Grace chilled at the thought that he might already have told his story to Mrs. Trenton in the hope of hastening the day of his freedom.