"It's pretty hard," said Clara, "when one has a—duty to society, and nothing to go on."
Katie was thinking that society must be a very vigorous thing, persisting through all the "duties" people had to it.
She smiled now in seeing that the thing which had brought her to Clara that day was in the nature of a "duty to society" and that in her case, too, a duty to society and a personal inclination moved happily together.
Katie was there that afternoon to buy Worth.
So she put it to herself in what Clara would have called her characteristically brutal fashion.
She was sure Worth could be had for a price. She had that price and she believed the psychological moment was at hand for offering it.
The reason for its being the psychological moment was that Clara wanted to join a party at Nice and did not have money enough to buy the clothes which would make her going worth while. For there was a man there—an American, a rich westerner—whom Clara's duty to society moved her to marry.
That was Katie's indelicate deduction from Clara's delicate hints.
And Katie wanted Worth. It wasn't wholly a matter of either affection or convenience. It had to do, and in almost passionate sense, with something which was at least in the category with such things as duties to society. Worth seemed to her too fine, too real, to be reared by a "truly feminine woman," as Clara had been known to call herself. Clara's great idea for Worth was that he be well brought up. That was Clara's idea of her duty to society. And it was Katie's notion of her duty to society to save him from being too well brought up.
The things she had been seeing, and suffering, in the past year made her feel almost savagely on the subject.