“As for the other woman,” she added, “there is nothing actually against her, but she is bad form. They are as poor as Job and riddled with debts; they have even been glad to let their eldest daughter marry the banker of their own county borough!”
To her humble companion, to whom not so very long before a banker’s clerk had seemed a functionary to be addressed as Sir, and viewed with deep respect, this social error did not carry a deep dye of iniquity. But she abandoned Lady Linlithgow; for the other culprit she ventured to plead.
“Lady Mary was so very kind to my child,” she murmured timidly. “When Kathleen was at school, before we came over, Lady Mary’s own daughters——”
“What has that to do with it? I tell you her daughters go out with their grandmother. You know nothing of all these things. You must do as you are told. You remember your blunder about my aunt Courcy?”
This reminiscence was a whip of nettles which always lay ready to her monitress’s hand, and the monitress used it with great effect. But such a blunder still seemed natural to her; Mrs. Cecil Courcy was a commoner, and these ladies who had just been turned from her gates were titled people. Why was the one at the apex of fashion, and the others “nowhere,” as her monitress expressed it.
She hinted timidly at this singular discrepancy, so unintelligible to the socially untutored mind.
“How is it possible to make you understand?” said Mouse, lighting a second cigarette before the first was half consumed, after the wasteful manner of female smokers. “Rank by itself is nothing at all; at least, well, yes, of course, it is something; but when people have got on the wrong side of the post, they are of no use socially to anybody. It isn’t what you do; it is how you do it. You know there is an old adage: ‘Some mustn’t look in at a church door, and others may steal all the church plate.’ It is always so in this world. Lady Mary’s muffed her life, as the boys say. I dare say there are worse women; but there isn’t one so stupid in all the three kingdoms. Who goes driving all alone with a tutor? Who makes a pet of a little two-sous Belgian fresco painter? Who gets herself talked about with the attorney of her own town? Nobody who has a grain of sense. These are things which put a woman out of society at once and for ever. I must beg you to try and understand one most essential fact. There are people extremely well-born who are shady, and there are others come from heaven knows where who are chic. It is due to tact more than anything else. Tact is, after all, the master of the ceremonies of life. It isn’t Burke or Debrett who can tell you who to know, and who to avoid. There is no Court Circular published which can show you where the ice won’t bear you, and where it will, whom you may only know out of England and whom you may safely know in it. There are no hard and fast rules about the thing. If you haven’t been born to that kind of knowledge you must grope about till you pick it up. I am very much afraid you will never pick it up. You will never know a princess without her gilt coach-and-six; you will never recognize an empress in a waterproof and goloshes; and you will never grasp the fact that supreme, inexorable, and omnipotent Fashion may be a little pale shabby creature like my aunt Courcy, who pinches and screws about a groschen, but who can make or mar people in society just as she pleases.”
Margaret Massarene winced. She had seen Mrs. Cecil Courcy that very day in the park driving with the Queen of Denmark, who was on a visit to Marlborough House. All these niceties of shade confused her utterly. “Society’s just like Aspinall’s Enamels,” she thought in her bewilderment; and if you wanted a plain yellow, you were confused by a score of gradations varying from palest lemon to deepest orange: there were no plain yellows any more.
“But I’ve always been told that if one’s pile’s big, real big, one can always go anywhere?” she ventured to say, unconscious of the cynical character of her remark.
“You can go to Court here, if that’s your ideal. You do go,” replied her teacher with a slighting accent of contempt which sounded like high treason to the mind of the Ulster loyalist; “but it don’t follow you can get in elsewhere. It just depends on lots of chances. Some people never get into the world at all; merely because they don’t spend their money cleverly at the onset.”