She felt that she had made a mistake, but she did not know what it was nor how to rectify it.
“I beg pardon, ma’am,” she said humbly; “I understood you to say as how you would introduce me to your family and friends in town and in the country. I didn’t mean any offence—indeed, indeed, I didn’t.”
“And none is taken,” said Lady Kenilworth graciously, thinking to herself, “One must suit oneself to one’s company. That’s how they talk, I believe, in the servants’ hall, where she ought to be.”
Aloud she continued:
“You see, whatever one says at Homburg, or indeed anywhere at all out of England, does not count in England: that is understood everywhere by everybody.”
“Really,” murmured Mrs. Massarene, confused and crestfallen: for it had been on the faith of this fair lady’s promises and predictions in the past summer that Harrenden House and Vale Royal had been purchased.
“Of course,” said Lady Kenilworth rather tartly, still looking at the gold water-vase, which exercised a strange fascination over her, as if it were a fetish which she was compelled, nolens volens, to worship. “Only imagine what a mob we should have round us at home if everyone we were civil to in Nice and Florence and Homburg and Ostend, and all the other places, could take us seriously and expect to be invited by us here. It would be frightful.”
Margaret Massarene sighed: existence seemed to her complicated and difficult to an extent which she could never have credited in the days when she had carried her milking-pails to and from the rich grass meadows of her old home in Ulster. In those remote and simple days “I’ll be glad to see you” meant “I shall be glad,” and when you ate out of your neighbor’s potato bowl, your neighbor had a natural right to eat in return out of yours—a right never disavowed. But in the great world these rules of veracity and reciprocity seemed unknown. Lady Kenilworth sat lost in thought some moments, playing with the ends of her feather boa and thinking whether the game were worth the candle. It would be such a dreadful bore!
Then there came before her mind’s eyes the sum total of many unpaid bills, and the vision of that infinite sweetness which lies in renewed and unlimited credit.
“You want to be lancée?” she said at last in her brusque yet graceful manner suddenly, as she withdrew her gaze from the tea-table, “Well, sometimes to succeed socially is very easy and sometimes it is very difficult—for new people very difficult. Society is always uncertain. It acts on no fixed principles. It keeps out A. and lets in B., and couldn’t possibly say why it does either. Your money alone won’t help you. There are such swarms of rich persons, and everybody who gets rich wants the same thing. You are, I believe, enormously rich, but there are a good many enormously rich. The world is in a queer state; ninety out of a hundred have nothing but debts, the other ten are gorged on money, gorged; it is very queer. Something is wrong. The sense of proportion has gone out of life altogether. You want, you say, to know people. Well, I can let you see them; you can come and meet them at my house; but I can’t make them take you up if they won’t do it.”