Mrs. Patton was still in mourning, a filmy and diaphanous kind of mourning, beautiful enough to placate the angel Azrael himself. A filmy and diaphanous creature was Mrs. Patton also—one could never have dreamed of so exquisite a black butterfly. She was very sweet and sympathetic, and told Thyrsis how much she had liked his book—so that Thyrsis concluded she was not half so bad as he had expected. After all, she might not have been to blame for the hosiery story—it might even have been a lie. He reflected that the yellow journals no doubt lied as freely about young leaders of intellectual sets in “society” as they did about starving authors.
Mrs. Patton wanted to know about Socialism, and sighed because it seemed so far away. She made several remarks that showed real intelligence—and this was startling to Thyrsis, who would as soon have expected intelligence from a real butterfly. He got a strange impression of a personality struggling to get into contact with life from behind a wall some ten million dollars high. Mrs. Patton had three young children, and her husband was one of the “Standard Oil crowd”; she complained to Thyrsis that “Parmy”—so she referred to the gentleman—was always in terror over her vagaries.
It was a new discovery to the author that the very rich might live under the shadow of fear, quite as much as the very poor. Their wealth made them a target for newspaper satire, so that they dared not depart from convention in the slightest detail. Mrs. Patton told how once she had ventured to romp for a few minutes with some children on the grounds of the “Casino”, and the next day all the world had read that she was introducing “tag” as a diversion for the Newport colony.
There came other callers, both women and men; Percy Ambler, man of fashion and dilettante poet; and with him little Murray Symington, who wrote the literary chat for “Knickerbocker’s Weekly”, and was therefore a power to be propitiated. There came Blanchard, the young and progressive publisher of the “Beau Monde”, a weekly whose circulation rivalled that of “Macintyre’s”. There came also young Macklin, Mrs. Patton’s nephew, with his monocle and his killing drawl. Macklin came by these honestly, having been brought up in England; but Thyrsis did not know that—he only heard the young gentleman’s passing reference to his yacht, and to his passion for the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé; and so he had it in for Macklin. Thyrsis had got involved in a serious discussion with Mrs. Patton and Symington, and was in the act of saying that the social problem could not be much longer left unsolved; and then he chanced to turn, and discovered young Macklin, surveying him with elaborate superciliousness, and asking with his British drawl, “Aw—I beg pawdon—but what do you mean by the social problem?” And Thyrsis, with a quick glance at him, answered, “I mean you.” So Macklin subsided; and Thyrsis learned afterwards that his remark was going the rounds, being considered to be a mot. It appeared the next week in the columns of a paper devoted to “society” gossip; and many a literary reputation had been made by a lesser triumph than that.
Thyrsis got new light upon the making of reputations, when he looked into the next issue of “Knickerbocker’s Weekly”. There he found that Murray Symington had devoted no less than three paragraphs to his personality and his book. It was all “sprightly”—that was Murray’s tone—but also it was cordial; and it referred to Thyrsis’ earlier novel, “The Hearer of Truth”, as “that brilliant piece of work”. Thyrsis read this with consternation—recalling that when the book had come out, not two years ago, “Knickerbocker’s Weekly” had referred to it as a “preposterous concoction”. Could it be true that an author’s work was “preposterous” while he was starving in a garret, and became “brilliant” when he was found in the drawing-room of Mrs. “Parmy” Patton?
Section 14. Thyrsis went on to penetrate yet deeper into these mysteries; there came a call from Murray Symington, to say that Mrs. Jesse Dyckman wanted him to dinner. Jesse Dyckman he recognized as the name of one of the most popular contributors to the magazines—his short stories of Fifth Avenue life were the delight of the readers of the “Beau Monde”.
“But I can’t go to dinner-parties with women!” protested Thyrsis. “I don’t dress!”
Murray took that message; but in a few minutes he called up again. “She says she doesn’t care whether you dress or not.”
“But then, I don’t eat!” protested Thyrsis, who had recently discovered Horace Fletcher.
“I know that won’t count,” said the other, laughing. “She doesn’t want you to eat—she wants you to talk.”