"Her mother got up at that and started to go. But Christina stopped her at the door and took hold of her arm. 'Mother,' she said, 'what does it matter? Oh, my poor mother, can't you see that whatever happens we have done with respectability? It's inevitable, it must be done. And to-night or to-morrow, what does it matter? Twenty-four hours, one way or the other, and then—mud to the right of us, mud to the left of us, and unto dust we shall return!' I thought they were the strangest words that ever came out of a girl's mouth on the night of what you might call her coronation!"
"And Mrs. Hope?"
"Mrs. Hope just took her daughter's hand off her arm and walked out of the door and out of the theater.—Well," said Wheeler, with a deep sigh, "it wasn't for me to do that. I'm a pretty long way from a Puritan! All the same, this thing made me sick. 'Chris,' said I, 'don't go with him! Take off those damned diamonds and tell him to go to hell! You can soon make diamonds for yourself, old girl!' She looked up, singing, in my face. And that's the last I saw of her."
"Go on!"
"My boy, you need a drink!"
"And Ten Euyck says—?"
"Oh, poor Ten Euyck—his dignity can't bend, so it's all cracked. He took her to supper at the Palisades and she left early." The Palisades was a new roadhouse up the river and the rage of that summer. "The zealous creature has even run to Kane and disgorged the names of his guests. So it leaks out that, once the poor soul had unbent so far as to be seen with an actress, he couldn't be devilish by halves. It seems miss was annoyed at the character of said guests, as well as at finding supper served in a private room. So with the offended majesty of an injured queen, she withdrew to no less public a spot than the entrance porch. There she sat, swathed in her cloak and with her skirts drawn about her, till the arrival of the cab she had insisted upon." Wheeler broke into a laugh. "That girl," he said, "is the devil himself!"
"And that—was that the very—last—?"
"Exactly. There she is, togged out in a white, silky crepe-y, trail-y dress, embroidered in silver, and a white lace opera cloak. In these useful and inconspicuous garments, she vanishes." His grim grin soured. "You know what they'll all say! Kane tells the Inghams she couldn't catch Ten Euyck so surely as with an irritant. She took, of all ways, the way to hold him. Why, she left him in public—him, the invulnerable corrector of women! He'll never rest until she is seen, in public, hanging on his arm! And then the man values his diamonds at forty thousand dollars!"
"She drove off alone, at midnight, in a taxicab, with forty thousand dollars' worth of diamonds round her neck—"