Davidge noted that Lady Clifton-Wyatt left the dining-room with a kind of eagerness, Marie Louise reluctantly. She cast him a look that seemed to cry “Help!” He wondered what the feud could be that threw Miss Webling into such apparent panic. He could not tolerate the thought that she had a yellow streak in her.
CHAPTER VI
Lady Clifton-Wyatt, like many another woman, was kept in order by the presence of men. She knew that the least charming of attributes in masculine eyes are the female feline, the gift and art of claws.
Men can be catty, too––tom-catty, yet contemptibly feline when they are not on their good behavior. There are times when the warning, “Gentlemen, there are ladies present,” restores them to order as quickly as the entrance of a teacher turns a school-room of young savages into an assembly of young saints.
The women in Mrs. Prothero’s drawing-room could not hear any of the words the men mixed with their smoke, but they could hear now and then a muffled explosion of laughter of a quality that indicated what had provoked it.
The women, too, were relieved of a certain constraint by their isolation. They seemed to enjoy the release. It was like getting their minds out of tight corsets. They were not impatient for the men––as some of the men may have imagined. These women were of an age where they had something else to think of besides men. They had careers to make or keep among women as well as the men among men.
The servants kept them on guard till the coffee, tobacco, and liqueurs were distributed. Then recess was declared. Marie Louise found herself on a huge tapestried divan provided with deep, soft cushions that held her like a quicksands. On one side of her was the mountainous Mrs. Dyckman resembling a stack of cushions cased in silk; on the other was Mildred Tait Fargeton, whose father had been ambassador to France.
Marie Louise listened to their chatter with a frantic impatience. Polly was heliographing ironic messages with her eyes. Polly was hemmed in by the wife of a railroad juggler, who was furious at the Administration because it did not put 128 all its transportation problems in her husband’s hands. She would not have intrusted him with the buying of a spool of thread; but that was different.