He did not relax his efforts to win his children’s hearts, and in the effort he began to feel a strange jealousy of Thorndyke, who had won them without any effort at all. Thorndyke had not only taken Roger and Elizabeth to the Zoo on the first Sunday, but on the next he had appeared, looking extremely sheepish, and had requested the pleasure of their company to the Zoo again. The children were in paroxysms of delight, and Annette laughed outright at Thorndyke, particularly when he admitted that he had declined an invitation to a breakfast at the Brentwood Baldwins on the ground of a previous engagement in order to carry out this little trip to the Zoo. The trio went off together in great spirits, and Crane and Annette were left alone. Through all the laughing and joking with the children, Crane had sat silent and sombre—they had not yet laughed and joked with him. Suddenly, he proposed a walk to Annette. It was so long since such a thing had occurred that he was embarrassed in giving the invitation, and she in accepting it; but they walked together along the country lanes in the quiet Sunday noon, and a shadow of the old confidence was restored between them. But Crane was still fully convinced that Annette was not cut out for the wife of a public man, and could not shine in cosmopolitan society. He was soon to have an opportunity to judge of her in this last particular.
Constance Maitland had set her mind to work upon that difficult and interesting problem—the composition of a small dinner. More than that, she meant it to be one at which Annette would be at her best.
The materials to form a good dinner abound in Washington, and Constance Maitland knew it. As the smart set in Washington is composed largely of persons who have made large fortunes in trade, and who have come to Washington to enjoy these fortunes, Constance knew that from this particular element she could not well draw the material for a really sparkling dinner. The people in Europe know something after all, and their dictum that an elegant and brilliant society cannot be constructed out of retired merchants has not yet been disproved. Let us be candid to ourselves. But in Washington the materials for a real society exist outside of this element, and Constance Maitland had been lucky enough to find it. Sir Mark le Poer was in town again, which Constance reckoned as a special Providence. Like all Englishmen of good position, Sir Mark was bored within an inch of his life by the Anglo-American girl, who is an easily detected imitation. Constance, having been a friend of Sir Mark’s for many years, and knowing him like a book, spared him this infliction. She selected in the construction of the party Mrs. Willoughby, an accomplished Washington woman, whose family had social antecedents dating back to the days of Abigail Adams. Mrs. Willoughby had been a distinguished hostess for twenty years, until the influx of pork, whiskey, dry-goods, and the like commodities had overwhelmed everything to the manner born. She took it all good-naturedly, and got a great deal of amusement out of the status quo. Then there was Mary Beekman, of New York, young, charming, and rich, whose parents had owned a box at the New York Academy of Music, but who were conspicuously out of it with the Metropolitan Opera set. As Mrs. Willoughby remarked, when Constance mentioned the party she had made up:
“What a very interesting collection of has-beens you have got together, my dear.”
For the men, besides Crane and Sir Mark le Poer, Constance had secured Thorndyke, an admirable dinner-man, and a courtly old Admiral—for she was quite unlike the widow of a prominent shoe-dealer, who emigrated to Washington and became violently fashionable, and who declared that on her visiting list she “drew the line at the army and navy.” On the evening of the dinner there was to be a belated reception at the White House, in honour of an international commission which had just opened its sittings in Washington, and it was arranged that the dinner should be somewhat early, that the whole party, being invited to the White House, might adjourn there.
The rest of the guests were assembled in Constance’s drawing-room before the Cranes arrived. Crane himself always looked superbly handsome in evening-clothes, and Annette’s appearance was scarcely inferior in another way. As on her first meeting with Constance, Annette gave the impression of being exquisitely gowned. A simple white crêpe, cut low, showed off her beautiful arms and shoulders, and a few moss rosebuds in their green leaves gave the needed touch of colour to her costume. Simplicity is always the last form of elegance to be attained, and Annette Crane had attained it.
Constance Maitland, too, was at her best, in a shimmering black gown, like a starry night, and with her grandmother’s pearl necklace around her white throat. Mrs. Willoughby, with resplendent black eyes and snow-white hair, looked like one of Sir Peter Lely’s court of beauties, and Mary Beekman was pretty enough to shine anywhere.
When they were seated around the table the men secretly congratulated themselves on the looks of the women with whom they were to dine; and Thorndyke voiced this opinion by quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes’s suggestion that peas and potatoes could be warmed into an early fruition by surrounding them with a ring of handsome women—such as were then present—which caused the ladies all to beam on him.
Annette, seated between the Admiral and Sir Mark le Poer, with Thorndyke’s kind eyes across the table to encourage her, and with Constance Maitland’s fine gift as a hostess to sustain her, felt perfectly at ease. Such was not the case with Crane himself. It was the first time he had ever dined at Constance Maitland’s house, and he yearned to distinguish himself. He wished the conversation would turn on public affairs; he felt he could easily lay them all under a spell then, forgetting that people don’t go out to dinner to be spellbound, but to enjoy an idle hour, and to exchange those pleasant freedoms and trifles which make up the sum of recreation.
The Admiral, a white-moustached, charming old man, who had hobnobbed with princes, and was none the worse for it, began to compliment Annette on her gown, after having previously called her “my dear.”