第41章

GRADUATED PEARLS.

But Scarborough declined her invitation.However, he did come to dinner ten days later; and Gladys, who had no lack of confidence in her power to charm when and whom she chose, was elated by his friendliness then and when she met him at other houses.

"He's not a bit sentimental," she told Pauline, whose silence whenever she tried to discuss him did not discourage her."But if he ever does care for a woman he'll care in the same tremendous way that he sweeps things before him in his career.

Don't you think so?"

"Yes," said Pauline.

She had now lingered at Saint X two months beyond the time she originally set.She told herself she had reached the limit of endurance, that she must fly from the spectacle of Gladys'

growing intimacy with Scarborough; she told Gladys it was impossible for her longer to neglect the new house in Fifth Avenue.With an effort she added: "You'd rather stay on here, wouldn't you?""I detest New York," replied Gladys."And I've never enjoyed myself in my whole life as I'm enjoying it here."So she went East alone, went direct to Dawn Hill, their country place at Manhasset, Long Island, which Dumont never visited.She invited Leonora Fanshaw down to stand between her thoughts and herself.Only the society of a human being, one who was light-hearted and amusing, could tide her back to any sort of peace in the old life--her books and her dogs, her horseback and her drawing and her gardening.A life so full of events, so empty of event.It left her hardly time for proper sleep, yet it had not a single one of those vivid threads of intense and continuous interest--and one of them is enough to make bright the dullest pattern that issues from the Loom.

In her "splendor" her nearest approach to an intimacy had been with Leonora.

She had no illusions about the company she was keeping in the East.To her these "friends" seemed in no proper sense either her friends or one another's.Drawn together from all parts of America, indeed of the world, by the magnetism of millions, they had known one another not at all or only slightly in the period of life when thorough friendships are made; even where they had been associates as children, the association had rarely been of the kind that creates friendship's democratic intimacy.They had no common traditions, no real class-feeling, no common enthusiasms--unless the passion for keeping rich, for getting richer, for enjoying and displaying riches, could be called enthusiasm.They were mere intimate acquaintances, making small pretense of friendship, having small conception of it or desire for it beyond that surface politeness which enables people whose selfish interests lie in the same direction to get on comfortably together.

She divided them into two classes.There were those who, like herself, kept up great establishments and entertained lavishly and engaged in the courteous but fierce rivalry of fashionable ostentation.Then there were those who hung about the courts of the rich, invited because they filled in the large backgrounds and contributed conversation or ideas for new amusements, accepting because they loved the atmosphere of luxury which they could not afford to create for themselves.

Leonora was undeniably in the latter class.But she was associated in Pauline's mind with the period before her splendor.

She had been friendly when Dumont was unknown beyond Saint X.

The others sought her--well, for the same reasons of desire for distraction and dread of boredom which made her welcome them.

But Leonora, she more than half believed, liked her to a certain extent for herself--"likes me better than I like her." And at times she was self-reproachful for being thus exceeded in self-giving.Leonora, for example, told her her most intimate secrets, some of them far from creditable to her.Pauline told nothing in return.She sometimes longed for a confidant, or, rather, for some person who would understand without being told, some one like Olivia; but her imagination refused to picture Leonora as that kind of friend.Even more pronounced than her frankness, and she was frank to her own hurt, was her biting cynicism--it was undeniably amusing; it did not exactly inspire distrust, but it put Pauline vaguely on guard.Also, she was candidly mercenary, and, in some moods, rapaciously envious.

"But no worse," thought Pauline, "than so many of the others here, once one gets below their surface.Besides, it's in a good-natured, good-hearted way."She wished Fanshaw were as rich as Leonora longed for him to be.