“Very well—but my first proposition will be revolutionary, I warn you. I shall suggest that we pay governesses enough to enable them to save something, and thus we can get hold of the economic problem by the head instead of by the tail.”
Was she really in earnest? Mrs. Hill-Smith did not know, but there was certainly a flippancy in Constance’s tone which shocked both Mrs. Hill-Smith and Miss Baldwin. The serious, hard-working women by whom they were mothered and grandmothered had given them a deadly soberness and energy in the pursuit of social schemes and pleasures, just as their forbears had industriously and seriously washed and baked and brewed.
Mrs. Hill-Smith was so annoyed by Constance’s manner of receiving her communication that if Constance had not been very intimate at the British Embassy Mrs. Hill-Smith would have made her displeasure felt. But she was constitutionally timid, like all social new-comers—timid in admitting people into her circle, and timid in turning them out—so she merely smiled brightly and said as they drove off:
“You’ll come like a dear, and be as revolutionary as you please. Good-bye.”
Constance, with her two men, lingered a minute, and then Crane left her. He yearned for his stenographer, and set out to seek him. Cathcart walked home with Constance and left her at the door. She was malicious enough to describe to him some of Mrs. Hill-Smith’s charities, at which Cathcart was in an ecstasy of amusement.
Meanwhile Mrs. Hill-Smith went home with Eleanor Baldwin to what they called breakfast, but most Americans call luncheon. On the way the two women had discussed Constance Maitland cautiously—each afraid to let on to the other what she really thought—because, after all, Constance was intimate at the British Embassy.
Arrived at the Baldwin house—an imposing white stone mansion, with twenty-five bedrooms for a family of four, of whom one was a boy at school, a family which never had a visitor overnight—Eleanor led the way to the library, where her father sat.
It was a great, high-ceiled, cool room, dark, in spite of many windows and a glass door opening on a balcony. At a library table near the glass door sat Mr. James Brentwood Baldwin, alias Jim Baldwin, and on the balcony outside, under the awning, sat Mrs. James Baldwin, née Hogan.
It was easy to see whence Eleanor Baldwin had got her beauty. Jim Baldwin was handsome, Nora Hogan Baldwin was handsomer.
From the days when Jim Baldwin had carried home parcels of tea and buckets of butter in his father-in-law’s corner grocery, he had cherished an honourable ambition to have a great big library full of books. In the course of time, through the operations of the shoe-stitching machine, he had been able to gratify this ambition and taste. He had all of those books which Charles Lamb declares “are no books—that is, all the books which no gentleman’s library should be without.” They were all bound sumptuously in calf, and éditions de luxe were as common as flies in a baker’s shop. The four vast walls were lined with these treasures, and from them Baldwin derived an excess of pleasure. This was not by reading them—he had never read a book in his life. Two Chicago newspapers, one from New York, and the Washington morning and evening papers satisfied his cravings for knowledge. But he got from the outside of his books all the pleasure that most people get from the inside. He justly felt that to be seen surrounded by the glorious company of the living who died a thousand years ago, and the conspicuous dead who live to-day, was to give him dignity and poise. Nobody but himself knew that he never read. His days were spent in his library—he always spoke of himself as “among my books”—and shrewd, sharp, and keen as he was and ever must remain, he had actually succeeded in bamboozling himself into the notion that he was a person of “literary tastes.”