If Miss Clergy and Thurley were mysteries to the hotel guests and attendants, so were the guests and attendants mysteries untold to Thurley and Miss Clergy. To be placed suddenly in New York with unlimited leeway in opportunities and money, cut off from every simple, human tie which heretofore had impressed itself on one’s emotional heart and be put to work at such a multitude of things that one could hardly remember which hour was designated for this and which for that—to say the very least, it was “tizzy,” as Hobart obligingly expressed it for Thurley during one of their lessons.
No less “tizzy” was it for Miss Clergy to waken from a selfish lethargy, with revenge the stimulating impulse; to try, all in an instant, to find her way back to the proper method of living combined with modern requirements and readjustments; to become accustomed to strange noises, vehicles, buildings, all manner of new and bewildering novelties which every one else, save her wild-rose Thurley, accepted as commonplace; to refrain from telling every one who talked with her the reason she had taken this homeless country girl to New York and was prepared to spend a fortune to make her a success.
The modistes and milliners used to gossip about it, after they had been in Miss Clergy’s rooms to take measurements and orders. So did the bootmaker Hobart had sent up, and the riding master and the language teacher and the social secretary, who somehow slipped into her place and became one of them. A veritable monument to fashion and smartness she was, with the way of making one sit up straight when one was least expecting the command, of smoothing out personal pronouns to the ease of every one concerned, who found time every day to make Thurley practise entering and leaving a room, bowing, shaking hands, smiling, laughing, holding her head just so, who had stacks of hateful cards and sheets of paper on which Thurley must write invitations to imaginary dinners and affairs and then reply to the invitations, who told one that the easiest way to carry on a conversation was to be an excellent listener, and yet, all in the same breath, made one memorize certain smart phrases or witty bon mots, historical dates of importance, soothing sentences which would fit in for the weather, a clay pigeon match or the assassination of the president—all these things and more did the social secretary achieve, Thurley groaning inwardly as the hour approached for her arrival.
Yet she stumbled through her lessons without bringing down too many frowns on her young shoulders, and when she sat at the improvised dinner table with a startling array of crystal glasses, goblets and small silver, and was requested to demonstrate the use of each, the social secretary nodded approval in a short time and said one day in that well-bred, monotonous voice,
“You’re so shockingly bright, Miss Precore, I’m sure there’s a scandal in the family somewhere,” laughing outright at Thurley’s embarrassment.
“Have you really had people more stupid than I?” she demanded.
“Dear, yes! My last two pupils were twins, Golda and Silva Muggins from New Mexico. It would take a regiment to count their fortunes—but their manners!” She shrugged her trim shoulders. “And yet they both are engaged and doing nicely—I’m to finish buying the trousseaux to-morrow.”
“What frightful work to teach—” Thurley began. At which the social secretary fled lest Thurley entangle her in a really human vein of conversation and endanger her poise.
Following these lessons Miss Clergy would have Thurley come into her room and have her repeat all she had learned, after which Thurley would manage to escape to her own bedroom to burst into rebellious, beautiful song. For singing at the present time seemed to be of the least importance of all the things she did!
A gymnast came each morning before breakfast and made her exercise and do folk dances, all manner of antics strange and, to her mind, ludicrous. There was a beauty doctor who did her nails and took charge of her hair and skin, showing her which colors were becoming and which were not and the test for any woman in doubt as to the proper shade to wear—to lay a strip of the proposed goods across the hair, not the throat or cheek, as women fondly delude themselves—and see if the light and effect are to be desired.