“I have fought my way through to you, Mrs. Duffield. Congratulate me.”
She held back her head; he saw the fading of her golden hair, the age of her throat, the indomitable blue of her eyes.
“This must be Mr. Rennard!”
She threw back her head still further, as if to send her laughter upward, and, boyishly, thrust out her hand. Taking it, Tom added to his vision the full ripe crowding of her breast—no longer firm to stand up alone—and the delicacy of her wrist.
She shunted him off almost at once: introducing him here and there, squandering the charm of her attention as one tosses showers of coin out of reach. He had no more of her.
But as Tom, having reached this goal of his progression, was now silted aimlessly away in wide, flat spurts of movement, he observed the crowd thrust together, into a unit, into a reason. It was so he carried it with him back into the hall, into the street. The crowd’s form turned crass as he seemed to understand the will that had brought it into being.... It was her house: she had created this turmoil. Why? Why, each Wednesday afternoon,—to make no mention of doubtless other times,—did this glowing woman need to congregate such spill of life, pack it into her rooms, feed it, coax it to place its stamp upon her? What joy could there be in what must largely stultify her individual world? Tom pondered. Was this greedy crowd somehow a vessel in which Mrs. Duffield poured herself? That it might carry her off? leave in the stir of her curtains, in the perfumed mist on her bibelots, a substitute for her own marks which should have quickened these? And if so, why?
Tom’s casual yet forever determined mind associated these impressions widely until he knew that such habits were a deep part of the City’s nature. He groped with his light.
“If I understand her, I hold her:—and all she holds. I’ll go again. I’ll see that this promiscuous call makes for a more intimate occasion.”
The occasion came. But already Tom had learned to like the gatherings he was pleased to call promiscuous. Their fumes curled into his nerves, made them willing for more. A hint of his new appetite in his condemnation to Cornelia.
“Business, my dear Sis: Business. And of the lowest degree of horridness.”