“I was going to call attention to that speck of soot that has just settled on your nose—your first!” Mrs. Blair continued. “Ah! there you have it now!” she concluded as Mrs. Craighill found the offender with her handkerchief.
“That, we may say, marks your baptism into full citizenship,” beamed Colonel Craighill.
As the residential area unfolded itself, he named the owners of many of the houses they were passing, while Mrs. Blair summarized their history in short, amusing phrases. Wayne, sitting on the front seat, turned his head to throw in a word now and then; but for the greater part he kept his own counsel. He overheard his sister’s rapid survey of the social geography of the Greater City. She declared that there was no debating the claims of the East End to social supremacy, though there were what she called “nice people” in the red brick homes of transpontine Allegheny. “Dick Wingfield,” she quoted, “always says that in crossing the river, Charon and not the bridge company gets the fee. Dick calls the river the Stygian wave.” Mrs. Blair was not sure that Mrs. Craighill quite took this in, but it did not matter in one who smiled responsively at everything and appeared anxious to please.
There was the usual difficulty in explaining to a stranger the triangular shape of the city clasped by its two rivers that so quickly flow as one, and the fact that you may, if you like, take a boat here for New Orleans if you are bent upon adventure. “Are there suburbs?” Mrs. Craighill asked; and rising to this prompting Mrs. Blair flashed an illuminating glance upon Stanwixley, where, she conceded, there were delightful people, but why they should live where they did was beyond her powers of understanding. Colonel Craighill protested now and then, but smilingly, as one who would, at the fitting moment, pronounce the final word in all such matters. Greater philosophers than Fanny Blair have found it difficult to hit off in a few phrases the social alignments of the Greater City. Where there is no centre, no common and unifying social expression, it is not easy to find a point of departure. Even the terra sancta of the East End presents no stern walls to the newcomer who can provide himself with a house and a chef. And it is not correct to speak of social strata in the City of the Iron Heart, for the term implies depth, and the life here at this period was wholly superficial, a thing of geography and cliques, the one fairly rigid, the other unstable and shifting. But these were the Years of the Great Prosperity, a time of broad social readjustments and generous inclusion. Poverty alone, we may say, enforces the rules of exact social differentiation; there has never been in America any society so scrupulous, proud and sensitive as that of the Southern cavaliers when they threw off their armour and returned to their despoiled estates.
It did not seem possible during these bountiful years that the wolf would ever yelp in the steep cañons of the Greater City, or that steel, iron and coal could ever less magically change to gold. It was, indeed, inconceivable that the prosperous citizens would not forever disport themselves in the glittering hotels of New York and go on discovering, like so many Columbuses, the delights of London and Paris. Nowhere were these Midases more in evidence than on the transatlantic steamers, where their millions were computed in awed whispers by less favoured travellers and the stewards danced with unwonted alacrity in the confident hope of largess.
“It’s our American habit”—Colonel Craighill was saying—“and not a bad trait, to believe our own state and our own city and our own quarter of the block where we live the most ideal place in the world. And this, Adelaide, is home!”
Mrs. Blair flung off her wraps in the hall and went to the dining room to interview the maid about breakfast. She arranged with her own hands the roses she had sent for this first table, and, this accomplished to her satisfaction, she peered into the cabinet that held the best of her mother’s Sevres with a lingering regret that she had not made way with it while there was yet time; for Mrs. Blair was eminently human, and women are never so weak as before the temptation to loot. She heard her father’s voice above, describing to his wife the character of the upper chambers and she joined Wayne in the library where he stood in the bay window looking out upon the thinning boughs of the maples.
“Well,” she exclaimed with a half sigh, “the worst is over.”
“You’ve done bully, Fanny. You’ve risen to the occasion!”
“Oh, it might be worse! It might be infinitely worse. What do you think of her?”