So he went forth to bring in more game, and he read no poetry these days.
CHAPTER XXII
The calm male observer might marvel at Bessie's elation over the prospect of sitting in Mrs. Anstruthers Leason's box at the performance of "Faust" given by the French Opera Company on tour. But no candid woman will. It could be explained partly by the natural desire to associate with entertaining, well-dressed folk, who were generally considered to be "the best," "the leaders" of local society. Sitting there in the stuffy box, which was a poor place for seeing or hearing, Bessie felt the satisfaction of being in the right company. She had discovered in one of the serried rows of the first balcony Kitty Sanders, whom she had known as a girl in Kansas City, where Bessie had once lived in the peregrinations of the Bissell family. Kitty had married a prosperous dentist and enjoyed with him an income nearly twice that of Rob Falkner. Kitty, scanning the boxes closely, also spied Bessie, and exclaimed to her husband:—
"Why, there's Bessie Bissell in that box! You know she married a young fellow, an engineer or something." And she added either aloud or to herself, "They seem to be in it,—that's the Leason box." While the alluring strains of the overture floated across the house, she mused at the strange mutations of fortune, which had landed Bessie Bissell there and herself here beside the dentist,—with some envy, in spite of three beloved children at home and a motorcar….
To the dispassionate male observer this state of mind might be more comprehensible if Bessie had appeared in Mrs. Corporation's box on a gala night at the Metropolitan, or in the Duchess of Thatshire's box at Covent Garden. But the strange fact of democracy is that instead of discouraging social desires it has multiplied them ten thousand fold. Every city in the land has its own Mrs. Anstruthers Leason or Mrs. Corporation, to form the local constellation, towards which the active-minded women of a certain type will always strive or gravitate, as you choose to put it. This being so, the American husband, one might suppose, would sigh for an absolute monarchy, where there is but one fixed social firmament, admission to which is determined by a despot's edict. Then the great middle class could rest content, knowing that forever, no matter what their gifts might be, their wives could not aspire to social heights. With us the field is clear, the race open to money and brains, and the result? Each one can answer for himself.
Isabelle, returning to her home that fall, with a slight surplus of vitality, was eager for life. "I have been dead so long," she said to her husband. "I want to see people!" Born inside the local constellation, as she had been, that was not difficult. Yet she realized soon enough that the Prices, prominent as they were, had never belonged to the heart of the constellation. It remained for her to penetrate there, under the guidance of the same Nannie Lawton whom as a girl she had rather despised. For every constellation has its inner circle, the members of which touch telepathically all other inner circles. The fact that Nannie Lawton called her by her first name would help her socially more, than the Colonel's record as a citizen or her husband's position in the railroad or their ample means. Before her second winter of married life had elapsed, she had begun to exhaust this form of excitement, to find herself always tired. After all, although the smudge of St. Louis on the level alluvial plains of America was a number of times larger than the smudge of Torso, the human formula, at least in its ornamental form, remained much the same. She was patroness where she should be patroness, she was invited where she would have felt neglected not to be invited, she entertained very much as the others she knew entertained, and she and her husband had more engagements than they could keep. She saw this existence stretching down the years with monotonous iteration, and began to ask herself what else there was to satisfy the thirst for experience which had never been assuaged.
Bessie, with a keener social sense, kept her eye on the game,—she had to, and her little triumphs satisfied her. Nan Lawton varied the monotony of "the ordinary round" by emotional dissipations that Isabelle felt herself to be above. Other women of their set got variety by running about the country to New York or Washington, to a hotel in Florida or in the mountains of Carolina, or as a perpetual resource to Paris and Aix and Trouville and London….
Isabelle was too intelligent, too much the daughter of her father, to believe that a part of the world did not exist outside the social constellation, and an interesting part, too. Some of those outside she touched as time went on. She was one of the board of governors for the Society of Country Homes for Girls, and here and on the Orphanage board she met energetic and well-bred young married women, who apparently genuinely preferred their charities, their reading clubs, the little country places where they spent the summers, to the glory of Mrs. Anstruthers Leason's opera box or dinner dance. As she shot about the city on her errands, social and philanthropic, Isabelle sometimes mused on the lives of the "others,"—all those thousands that filled the streets and great buildings of the city. Of course the poor,—that was simple enough; the struggle for life settled how one would live with ruthless severity. If it was a daily question how you could keep yourself housed and fed, why it did not matter what you did with your life. In the ranks above the poor, the little people who lived in steam-heated apartments and in small suburban boxes had their small fixed round of church and friends, still closely circumscribed and to Isabelle, in her present mood,—simply dreadful. When she expressed this to Fosdick, whom she was taking one morning to a gallery to see the work of a local artist that fashionable people were patronizing, he had scoffed at her:—
"Madame la princesse," he said, waving his hand towards the throng of morning shoppers, "don't you suppose that the same capacity for human sensation exists in every unit of that crowd bent towards Sneeson's as in you?"
"No," protested Isabelle, promptly; "they haven't the same experience."