第18章

Alice Palgrave's partner had dealt, and having gone three in "no trumps" and found seven to the ace, king, queen in hearts lying before her in dummy, she wore a smile of beatific satisfaction.So also did Alice--for two reasons.The deal obviously spelled money, and Vere Millet could be trusted to get every trick out of it.There were four bridge tables fully occupied in the charming drawing-room, and as she caught the hostess' eye and smiled, she felt just a little bit like a fairy godmother in having surrounded Joan with so many of the smartest members of the younger set barely three weeks after her astonishing arrival in a city in which she had only one friend.

Alice didn't blind herself to the fact that in order to gamble, most of the girls in the room would go, without the smallest discrimination, to anybody's house; but there were others,--notably Mrs.Alan Hosack, Mrs.Cooper Jekyll and Enid Ouchterlony,--whose pride it was to draw a hard, relentless line between themselves and every one, however wealthy, who did not belong to families of the same, or almost the same, unquestionable standing as their own.

Their presence in the little house in East Sixty-seventh Street gave it, they were well aware, a most enviable cachet and placed Joan safely within the inner circle of New York society--the democratic royal inclosure.It was something to have achieved so soon--little as Joan appeared, in her astonishing coolness, to appreciate it.The Ludlows, as Joan had told Alice with one of her frequent laughs, might have come over in the only staterooms on the ship which towed the heavily laden Mayflower, but that didn't alter the fact that the Hosacks, the Jekylls and the Ouchterlonys were the three most consistently exclusive and difficult families in the country, to know whom all social climbers would joyously mortgage their chances of eternity.Alice placed a feather in her cap accordingly.

Joan's table was the first to break up.She was a loser to the tune of seventy dollars, and while she wrote her check to Marie Littlejohn, a tiny blond exotic not much older than herself,--who laid down the law with the ripe authority of a Cabinet Minister and kept to a daily time-table with the unalterable effrontery of a fashionable doctor,--talked over her shoulder to Christine Hurley.

"Alice tells me that your brother has gone to France with the Canadian Flying Corps.Aren't you proud of him?""I suppose so, but it isn't our war, and they're awfully annoyed about it at Piping Rock.He was the crack man of the polo team, you know.I don't see that there was any need of his butting into this European fracas.""I quite agree with you," said Miss Littlejohn, with her eyes on the clock."I broke my engagement to Metcalfe Hussey because he insisted on going over to join the English regiment his grandfather used to belong to.I've no patience with sentimentality." She took the check and screwed it into a small gold case."I'm dining with my bandage-rolling aunt and going on to the opera.Thank goodness, the music will drown her war talk.Good-by." She nodded here and there and left, to be driven home with her adipose chow in a Rolls-Royce.

Christine Hurley touched a photograph that stood on Joan's desk.

"Who's this good-looking person?" she asked.

"My husband," said Joan.

"Oh, really! When are we to see something of him?""Oh, I don't know," said Joan."He's about somewhere."Miss Hurley laughed."It's like that already, is it? Haven't you only just been married?""Yes," said Joan lightly, "but we've begun where most people leave off.It's a great saving of time and temper!"The sophisticated Christine, no longer in the first flush of giddy youth, still unmarried after four enterprising years, was surprised into looking with very real interest at the girl who had been until that moment merely a hostess.Her extreme finish, her unself-conscious confidence and intrepidity, her unassumed lightness of temper were not often found in one so young and apparently virginal.

She dismissed as unbelievable the story that this girl had been brought up in the country in an atmosphere of early Victorianism.

She had obviously just come from one of those elaborate finishing schools in which the daughters of rich people are turned into hothouse plants by sycophants and parasites and sent out into the world the most perfect specimens of superautocracy, to patronize their parents, scoff at discipline, ignore duty and demand the sort of luxury that brought Rome to its fall.With admiration and amusement she watched her say good-by to one woman after another as the various tables broke up.It really gave her quite a moment to see the way in which Joan gave as careless and unawed a hand to Mrs.

Alan Hosack and Mrs.Cooper Jekyll as to the Countess Palotta, who had nothing but pride to rattle in her little bag; and when finally she too drove away, it was with the uneasy sense of dissatisfaction that goes with the dramatic critic from a production in which he has honestly to confess that there is something new--and arresting.

Alice Palgrave stayed behind.She felt a natural proprietary interest in the success of the afternoon."My dear," she said emotionally, "you're perfectly wonderful!""I am? Why?"

"To any other just-married girl this would have been an ordeal, a nerve-wrecking event.But you've been as cool as a fish--I've been watching you.You might have been brought up in a vice-regal lodge and hobnobbed all your life with ambassadors.How do you do it?"Joan laughed and threw out her arms."Oh, I don't know," she said, with her eyes dancing and her nostrils extended."I don't stop to think how to do things.I just do them.These people are young and alive, and it's good to be among them.I work off some of my own vitality on them and get recharged at the sound of their chatter.