Mrs. Baldwin was one of the handsomest women in Washington, and considered quite the proudest. Her abundant grey hair, setting off a face of Grecian beauty, gave her a look as of a queen in the days of powder and patches. She had a rarity of speech, a way of looking straight ahead of her, which was regal. But this exterior of pride was really a result of the sincerest bashfulness and reserve. When Nora Hogan, the grocer’s daughter, had married Jim Baldwin, the contractor’s son, Fortune was already smiling on Jim. Then suddenly she opened her apron and deluged him with gold. Mrs. Baldwin was frightened and stunned. She was afraid to say much for fear she might make mistakes—so she gradually came to saying nothing at all. She dreaded to look from side to side for fear she might find some one laughing at her. So she always looked straight ahead of her. By degrees she acquired a degree of coldness, of stiffness, that was perfectly well suited to the mother of Lady Clara Vere de Vere. She was, of course, an unhappy woman, being a misjudged one. Her chief solace lay in the practice of secret acts of charity among the poorest of the poor, not letting her left hand know what her right hand did. The promoters of fashionable charities complained that Mrs. Baldwin was so stately and so unsympathetic that they could not get on with her in charitable work. True it is, that at the meetings for fashionable charities Mrs. Baldwin would be more silent, more queenly than ever, but her heart would be crying aloud for the poor who are born to suffer and to die, and to have helped them she would cheerfully have given the very clothes off her back. But cowardice kept her silent, as it kept her silent in the presence of her servants, whom she feared inexpressibly.
If Mrs. Baldwin was constitutionally timid, not so Eleanor. All the courage of her father had gone into his willowy, beautiful, well-groomed daughter. Her first recollections were of the inland town where they lived secluded in their big house, because nobody was good enough for them to associate with after their fortune was made. Then she was taken to Europe and returned a finished product, with no more notion of what the word “American” meant than if she had been a daughter of the Hapsburgs. As a compromise between Europe and America, Baldwin had pitched upon Washington as a place of residence. His social status had been agreeably fixed by a lucky accident—he had been asked to be pall-bearer for a foreign Minister who died in Washington. Baldwin rightly considered the dead diplomat worth, to him, all the live ones going; for, having assisted in carrying the dead man from the Legation to the hearse, Baldwin was, in consequence, elected to the swell club, asked to the smart cotillion, and made more headway in a month in the smart set than he could have made otherwise in a year. He repaid his debt to the dead diplomat by buying some very ordinary pictures at the sale of the Minister’s effects, and paying the most extravagant price ever heard of for them.
To Eleanor their social rise was nothing surprising. She expected it, having been bred like a young princess, only with less of democracy than real princesses are bred. When she entered the room with Mrs. Hill-Smith, Baldwin rose and responded smilingly to Mrs. Hill-Smith’s remark:
“Here you are, as usual, among your books.”
“Yes—as usual, among my books. I daresay your father, the Secretary, spends a good deal of time among his books.”
“Oh, yes,” replied Mrs. Hill-Smith, airily, “but he has been dreadfully put out of late. Congress has been so troublesome. I don’t know exactly how, but it has annoyed papa extremely.”
“Very reprehensible,” said Baldwin, earnestly, who had the opinion of the average commercial man that Congress is a machine to create prosperity, or its reverse, and if prosperity is not created, Congressmen are blamed fools.
“I hate Congressmen—except a few from New York,” said Eleanor, drawing off her gloves daintily. “There was one talking to Miss Maitland when we stopped her on the street just now. The creature was introduced to me at one of those queer Southern houses where they introduce people without asking permission first, and ever since then the man has tried to talk to me whenever we meet. But I really couldn’t stand him. This morning I cut him dead. His name is Crane, and he’s from somewhere in the West.”
Now it happened that there was another Crane in the House from the West, and Baldwin had a business motive for wishing to cultivate this particular Crane—and business was business still with Jim Baldwin. So, at Eleanor’s words, he turned on her. His air of scholar-and-gentleman, man-of-the-world, and person-of-inherited-leisure suddenly dropped from him; he was once more Jim Baldwin, the shoe-stitching-machine man.
“Then let me tell you,” he said, authoritatively, “you made a big mistake. That man Crane is on the Committee on Manufactures, and we have been arguing with him, and sending the most expensive men we have to prove to him that we are entitled to the same rebate on the platinum used in our machines as the Oshkosh Shoe-Stitching-Machine people get—and I have reason to know that Crane is the man standing in the way. I wish you had snuggled right up to him.”