She had dropped all her old friends and the new ones were faithless and few.
She had been forced by her lord and master to cease her acquaintance with the wives of aldermen and city magnates and magistrates; good-natured wealthy women, who had been willing to make her one of themselves; and the desired successors, the women of the world, were only conspicuous by their absence.
She was dressed admirably by a great authority on clothes; but the dull Venetian red, embroidered with gold thread and slashed with tawny color, was suited to a Vittoria Accrombona, to a Lucrezia Borgia, and did not suit at all the large loose form and the pallid insignificant features of their present wearer.
When the head cutter of the great Paris house which had turned out that magnificent gown had ventured to suggest to its chief that such attire was thrown away on such a face and figure as these, that Oracle had answered with withering contempt, “Rien ne va aux gens de leur espèce, excepté leur tablier d’ouvrière. Et le tablier on ne veut plus porter!”
His scorn was unutterable for all “gens de leur espèce,” but he did what he could for them; he let them have exquisite attire and sent them very long bills. It was not his fault if they never knew how to wear their clothes; he could not teach them that secret, which only comes by the magic of nature and breeding. The present wearer of his beautiful Venetian red and gold gown was laced in until she could scarcely breathe; her fat hands were covered with beautiful rings; her grey hair had been washed with gold-colored dye; her broad big feet, which had stood so many years before cooking stoves and washtubs, were encased in Venetian red hose of silk and black satin shoes with gold buckles; her maid had assured her that she looked like a picture but she felt like a guy, and was made nervous by the Medusa-like gaze of the men in black who occasionally flitted across her boudoir to attend to a lamp, contract the valve of the calorifère, or lay the afternoon papers cut and aired by her chair.
“If only they wouldn’t look at me so!” she thought, piteously. What must they think of her, sitting alone like this, day after day, week after week, when the dreary two hours’ drive in the Park was over, behind the high-stepping horses, which were the envy of all beholders, but to their owners seemed strange, terrible and dangerous creatures.
London was full, not with the suffocating fullness indeed of July, but with the comparative animation which comes into the street with the meeting of Parliament.
But not a soul had passed those gates as yet, at least not one as human souls had of late become classified in the estimation of the dwellers within them.
The beautiful rooms seemed to yawn like persons whose mind and whose time are vacant. The men in black and the men in powder yawned also, and bore upon their faces the visible expression of that depression and discontent which were in their bosoms at the sense, ever increasing in them, that every additional day in the house of people whom nobody knew, robbed them of caste, injured their prestige, and ruined their future.
The mistress of the palace only did not yawn because she was too agitated, too nervous and disappointed and unhappy to be capable of such a minor suffering a ennui; she was not dull because she was strung up to a high state of anxious expectation, gradually subsiding, as day after day went on, to a complete despair.