“My dear girl!” I broke in again. “Stop a moment and let me talk!”
“But I hate to have to think—”
“Don’t worry about my thoughts! They are most happy ones! You must understand that a Socialist cannot feel about such things as you do; we work out our economic interpretation of them, and after that they are simply so much data to us. I might meet one of your great friends, and she might snub me, but I would never think she had snubbed me—it would be my Western accent, and my forty-cent hat, and things like that which had put me in a class in her mind. My real self nobody can snub—certainly not until they’ve got at it.”
“Ah!” said Sylvia, with shining eyes. “You have your own kind of aristocracy, I see!”
“What I want,” I said, “is you. I’m an old hen whose chickens have grown up and left her, and I want something to mother. Your wonderful social world is just a bother to me, because it keeps me from gathering you into my arms as I’d like to. So what you do is to think of some role for me to play, so that I can come to see you; let me be advising you about your proposed day-nursery, or let me be a tutor of something, or a nice, respectable sewing-woman who darns the toes of your silk stockings!”
She laughed. “If you suppose that I’m allowed to wear my stockings until they have holes in them, you don’t understand the perquisites of maids.” She thought a moment, and then added: “You might come to trim hats for me.”
By that I knew that we were really friends. If it does not seem to you a bold thing for Sylvia to have made a joke about my hat, it is only because you do not yet know her. I have referred to her money-consciousness and her social-consciousness; I would be idealizing her if I did not refer to another aspect of her which appalled me when I came to realise it—her clothes-consciousness. She knew every variety of fabric and every shade of colour and every style of design that ever had been delivered of the frenzied sartorial imagination. She had been trained in all the infinite minutiae which distinguished the right from the almost right; she would sweep a human being at one glance, and stick him in a pigeon hole of her mind for ever—because of his clothes. When later on she had come to be conscious of this clothes-consciousness, she told me that ninety-nine times out of a hundred she had found this method of appraisal adequate for the purposes of society life. What a curious comment upon our civilization—that all that people had to ask of one another, all they had to give to one another, should be expressible in terms of clothes!
16. I had set out to educate Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver in the things I thought she needed to know. A part of my programme was to find some people of modern sympathies whom she might meet without offence to her old prejudices. The first person I thought of was Mrs. Jessie Frothingham, who was the head of a fashionable girls’ school, just around the corner from Miss Abercrombie’s where Sylvia herself had received the finishing touch. Mrs. Frothingham’s was as exclusive and expensive a school as the most proper person could demand, and great was Sylvia’s consternation when I told her that its principal was a member of the Socialist party, and made no bones about speaking in public for us.
How in the world did she manage it? For one thing, I answered, she ran a good school—nobody had ever been heard to deny that. For another, she was an irresistibly serene and healthy person, who would look one of her millionaire “papas” in the eye and tell him what was what with so much decision; it would suddenly occur to the great man that if his daughter could be made into so capable a woman, he would not care what ticket she might vote.
Then too, it was testimony to the headway we are making that we are ceasing to be dangerous, and getting to be picturesque. In these days of strenuous social competition, when mammas are almost at their wits’ end for some new device, when it costs incredible sums to make no impression at all—here was offered a new and inexpensive way of being unique. There could be no question that men were getting to like serious women; the most amazing subjects were coming up at dinner-parties, and you might hear the best people speak disrespectfully of their own money, which means that the new Revolution will have not merely its “Egalité Orleans,” but also some of the ladies of his family!