“Yes; didn't you know him?”
“No,” said Corey sadly. “I don't know anybody nowadays. I seem to be going to pieces every way. I don't call sixty-nine such a very great age.”
“Not at all!” cried Mrs. Brinkley. “I'm fifty-four myself, and Brinkley's sixty.”
“But I feel a thousand years old. I don't see people, and when I do I don't know 'em. My head's in a cloud.” He let it hang heavily; then he lifted it, and said: “He's a nice, comfortable fellow, Munt is. Why didn't he stop and talk a bit?”
“Well, Munt's modest, you know; and I suppose he thought he might be the third that makes company a crowd. Besides, nobody stops and talks a bit at these things. They're afraid of boring or being bored.”
“Yes, they're all in as unnatural a mood as if they were posing for a photograph. I wonder who invented this sort of thing? Do you know,” said the old man, “that I think it's rather worse with us than with any other people? We're a simple, sincere folk, domestic in our instincts, not gregarious or frivolous in any way; and when we're wrenched away from our firesides, and packed in our best clothes into Jane's gilded saloons, we feel vindictive; we feel wicked. When the Boston being abandons himself—or herself—to fashion, she suffers a depravation into something quite lurid. She has a bad conscience, and she hardens her heart with talk that's tremendously cynical. It's amusing,” said Corey, staring round him purblindly at the groups and files of people surging and eddying past the corner where he sat with Mrs. Brinkley.
“No; it's shocking,” said his companion. “At any rate, you mustn't say such things, even if you think them. I can't let you go too far, you know. These young people think it heavenly, here.”
She took with him the tone that elderly people use with those older than themselves who have begun to break; there were authority and patronage in it. At the bottom of her heart she thought that Bromfield Corey should not have been allowed to come; but she determined to keep him safe and harmless as far as she could.
From time to time the crowd was a stationary mass in front of them; then it dissolved and flowed away, to gather anew; there were moments when the floor near them was quite vacant; then it was inundated again with silken trains. From another part of the house came the sound of music, and most of the young people who passed went two and two, as if they were partners in the dance, and had come out of the ball-room between dances. There was a good deal of nervous talk, politely subdued among them; but it was not the note of unearthly rapture which Mrs. Brinkley's conventional claim had implied; it was self-interested, eager, anxious; and was probably not different from the voice of good society anywhere.