"How are you, dearie?" she drawled in greeting. "This is Mr. Thomas Randall Cairy, Margaret's cousin,—do you remember? He says he has met you before, but Thomas usually believes he has met ladies whom he wants to know!" Then Conny turned away, and thereafter paid little attention to the Lanes, as though she wished them to understand that the luncheon was not given for them.
"In this case," Cairy remarked, "Mrs. Woodyard's gibe happens to miss. I haven't forgotten the Virginian hills, and I hope you haven't."
It was Cairy who explained the people to Isabelle:—
"There is Gossom, the little moth-eaten, fat man at the door. He is the mouthpiece of the People's, but he doesn't dislike to feast with the classes. He is probably telling Woodyard at this moment what the President said to him last week about Princhard's articles on the distillery trust!"
Among the Colonel's friends the magazine reporter Princhard had been considered an ignorant and malicious liar. Isabelle looked eagerly as Cairy pointed him out,—a short, bespectacled man with a thin beard, who was talking to Silver.
"There is the only representative of the fashionable world present, Mrs. George Bertram, just coming in the door. We do not go in for the purely fashionable—yet," he remarked mockingly. "Mrs. Bertram is interested in music,—she has a history, too."…
By the time the company were ready to lunch, Isabelle's pulse had risen with excitement. She had known, hitherto, but two methods of assimilating friends and acquaintances,—pure friendship, a good-natured acceptance of those likable or endurable people fate threw in one's way; and fashion,—the desire to know people who were generally supposed to be the people best worth knowing. But here she perceived quickly there was a third principle of selection—"interest." And as she glanced about the appointments of Conny's smart little house, her admiration for her old schoolmate rose. Conny evidently had a definite purpose in life, and had the power and intelligence to pursue it. To the purposeless person, such as Isabelle had been, the evidences of this power were almost mysterious.
At first the talk at the table went quite over Isabelle's head. It consisted of light gibe and allusion to persons and things she had never heard of,—a new actress whom the serious Percy was supposed to be in love with, Princhard's adventure with a political notability, a new very "American" play. Isabelle glanced apprehensively at her husband, who was at Conny's end of the table. Lane was listening appreciatively, now and then exchanging a remark with the lawyer across the table. John Lane had that solid acquaintance with life which made him at home in almost all circumstances. If he felt as she did, hopelessly countrified, he would never betray it. Presently the conversation got to politics, the President, the situation at Albany. Conny, with her negligent manner and her childish treble voice, gave the talk a poke here and there and steered it skilfully, never allowing it to get into serious pools or become mere noise. In one of the shifts Cairy asked Isabelle, "Have you seen Margaret since her return?"
"Yes; tell me why they came back!"
Cairy raised his eyebrows. "Too much husband, I should say,—shouldn't you?"