"Come and try it; you will, I suppose?"
In spite of Margaret's gibes at her distant cousin, Isabelle enjoyed Cairy. He was the kind of man she had rarely seen and never known: by birth a gentleman, by education and ambition a writer, with a distinct social sense and the charm of an artist. In spite of his poverty he had found the means to run about the world—the habited part of it—a good deal, and had always managed to meet the right people,—the ones "whose names mean something." He was of the parasite species, but of the higher types. To Isabelle his rapid talk, about plays, people, pictures, the opera, books, was a revelation of some of that flowing, stream of life which she felt she was missing. And he gave her the pleasant illusion of "being worth while." The way he would look at her as he rolled a cigarette on the veranda steps, awaiting her least word, flattered her woman's sympathy. When he left for Washington, going, as he said, "where the People's call me," she missed him distinctly.
"I hope I shall meet him again!"
"You will," Margaret replied. "Thomas is the kind one meets pretty often if you are his sort. And I take it you are!"
Isabelle believed that Margaret Pole was jealous of her young cousin or piqued because of a sentimental encounter in their youth. Cairy had hinted at something of this kind. Margaret patted Isabella's pretty head.
"My little girl," she mocked, "how wonderful the world is, and all the creatures in it!"
* * * * *
From this month's visit at the Springs the Colonel got some good golf, Mrs. Price a vivid sense of the way people threw their money about these days ("They say that Wall Street broker gave the head waiter a hundred dollar bill when he left!"). And Isabelle had absorbed a miscellaneous assortment of ideas, the dominant one being that intelligent Americans who really wished to have interesting lives went East to live, particularly to New York. And incidentally there was inserted in the nether layers of her consciousness the belief that the world was changing its ideas about women and marriage, "and all that." She desired eagerly to be in the current of these new ideas.
CHAPTER XX
"What makes a happy marriage?" Rob Falkner queried in his brutal and ironical mood, which made his wife shiver for the proprieties of pleasant society. It was at one of Bessie's famous Torso suppers, when the Lanes and Darnells were present.