"Don"t you, honestly, Cindy?" f.a.n.n.y asked. "I should think you"d love that sort of thing. You used to be perfectly mad about acting."
"So is every woman--isn"t she?--at one stage or another of her life convinced she"s truly a great actress cheated out of her birthright."
"I know. All the same you know you"ve got talent. Don"t you remember our open-air performance of _Much Ado About Nothing_? You were a simply ravishing Rosalind."
"Heavens! What do amateur theatricals prove?"
"For one thing," Jean Sedley commented, "how long-suffering one"s friends can be."
"And one"s enemies. Consider what they sit through just to see us make public guys of ourselves."
"Well!" Nelly Guest lamented: "my pet enemies are going to have a real treat at the pageant unless I can find some way to reduce, inside a fortnight."
"There was a man in London had a marvelous system," f.a.n.n.y volunteered.
"Everybody was going to him last Season. There ought to be somebody like him over here."
Duly encouraged, she launched into a startlingly detailed account of London"s latest fad in "treatment"; and Lucinda"s thoughts turned back to her other self, insensibly her ident.i.ty receded into and merged with its ident.i.ty again and became lost in its preoccupations.
How to go on, how to play out this farce of a life with Bel when faith in him was dead?
Strange that faith should have been shattered finally by such a minor accident as her overhearing that morning"s treachery. As if it had been the first time she had known Bel to be guilty of disloyalty to her! But today she could not forget that neither love nor any kindly feeling for his wife, nor even scruples of self-respect, but only dread of a contretemps had decided Bel against lunching Amelie in that very room, making open show o his infatuation before all those people who knew them both and who, being human, must have gloated, nudged, and t.i.ttered; who, for all Lucinda knew to the contrary, were even now jeering behind their hands, because they knew things about Bel and his gallivantings which all the world knew but his wife. Even the servants----!
Her cheeks kindled with indignation--and blazed still more ardently when she discovered that she had, in her abstraction, been staring squarely at Richard Daubeney, who was lunching with friends at a nearby table.
But Dobbin bowed and smiled in such a way that Lucinda"s confusion and her sense of grievance were drowned under by a wave of grat.i.tude. She nodded brightly and gave him a half-laughing glance.
Good old Dobbin! She had never appreciated how much she was missing him till he had turned up again last night and offered to take his old place in her life, on the old terms as nearly as might be, the old terms as necessarily modified by her own change of status.
_What a pity!_
Those three words were so clearly sighed in her mental hearing that Lucinda, fearing lest she had uttered them aloud, hastily consulted the faces of her companions. But they had exhausted the subject of reducing regimes and pa.s.sed on naturally--seeing that Nelly and Jean were approaching that stage when such matters become momentous--to that of "facials."
"... Parr"s fuller"s earth and witch hazel. Make a thick paste of it and add a few drops of tincture of benzoin, then simply plaster it all over your face, but be careful not to get it near your eyes, and let it dry.
It only takes a few minutes to harden, and then you crack and peel it off, and it leaves your skin like a baby"s."
"Elizabeth Baird charges twenty-five dollars a treatment."
"But my dear, you can see for yourself how stupid it is to pay such prices to a beauty specialist when the materials cost only a few cents at any drug-store, and anybody can apply it, your maid if you don"t want to take the trouble yourself...."
_What a pity!_
But was it? Would she have been happier married to Dobbin? Was it reasonable to a.s.sume that Dobbin would not have developed in the forcing atmosphere of matrimony traits quite as difficult as Bel"s to deal with?
In this wrong-headed world n.o.body was beyond criticism, and anybody"s faults, condonable though they might seem at a distance, could hardly fail of exaggeration into vices through daily observation at close range. Impossible to imagine any two human creatures living together, after the first raptures had begun to wane, without getting on each other"s nerves now and then.
Wasn"t the fault, then, more with the inst.i.tution than with the individuals?
Lucinda remembered having once heard a physician of psycho-a.n.a.lytic bent commit himself to the statement that in ten years of active professional life he had never entered one menage where two people lived in wedded happiness. And sifting a list of married acquaintances, Lucinda found it not safe to say of one that he or she was happy; of most it was true that they had the best of reasons for being unhappy. It was true of Nelly Guest and Jean Sedley, it was true of herself, doubtless it was true of f.a.n.n.y. Lucinda had yet to meet Lontaine, and if f.a.n.n.y"s looks were fair criterion, she was the most carefree of women; and yet...
f.a.n.n.y caught Lucinda eyeing her and smiled.
"What under the sun are you thinking about so solemnly, Cindy?"
"You, dear. You haven"t told me anything about yourself yet."
"No chance. Give me half a show"--f.a.n.n.y glanced askance at Jean and Nelly, now amiably engaged in bickering about the merits of various modistes--"and you shall know All."
"I"d dearly love to. You must lunch with me at home some day soon; and then I want you and your husband to dine with us--say next Thursday?"
"I don"t know. That"s one of the exciting things about being married to Harry Lontaine, one never knows what tomorrow will bring forth. We"ve got to go to Chicago soon, because--daresay you know--father relented enough to leave me a little legacy, nothing to brag about, but nothing people in our position can afford to despise, either."
Lucinda made a sympathetic face and said something vague about everybody in England still feeling the pinch of the War. But f.a.n.n.y elected to scorn generalizations.
"Oh, the only effect the War could have had on our fortunes would have been to kill off the half a dozen relatives that stand between Harry and the t.i.tle. But he was out of luck--served three years in France and Flanders and got all shot up and decorated with the dearest little tin medals on the prettiest ribbons, while his precious kinsmen held down cushy berths in the Munitions and kept in training for the longevity record."
"But how proud you must have been----!"
"Of Harry? On account of his decorations? My dear: heroes are three-a-penny in England today. You see, everybody, more or less, barring Harry"s family, had a shot at active service, just as almost everybody has a shot at marriage sooner or later; only, of course, the percentage of unscarred survivors of the War was higher."
(f.a.n.n.y, too! What a world!)
"For all that, I do want to meet your husband."
"You will, soon enough. He"s lunching some men down in the grill, a business luncheon, American cinema people; and I told him when he got rid of them to wait for me in the lounge. Very likely we"ll find him there on our way out."
"How nice. He"s interested in the motion-picture business then?"
"In a way. That is, he was, in England, for a while, after the War. And when we decided to come over about my legacy, he secured options on the American rights to some Swedish productions. Somebody told him you were having a run on foreign films over here, so Harry said he might as well try to turn an honest penny. I told him it wouldn"t do him any harm, he"d enjoy the adventure."
"I see," said Lucinda a bit blankly. "I don"t know much about it, of course, almost never go to see a motion picture; that is, unless it"s Elsie Ferguson, I"ve always been mad about her."
She looked round to the waiter who was subst.i.tuting a finger-bowl for her neglected sweet. "We"ll all want coffee, Ernest, and you may bring it to us in the Palm Room."
"Four demi-ta.s.ses: yes, Mrs. Druce."
"Nelly! Jean!" These Lucinda haled forth from the noisome mora.s.s of the newest divorce scandal. "f.a.n.n.y"s first husband is waiting for her in the lounge, and she"s getting nervous."
"Good-looking, I suppose?" Jean Sedley enquired, and got a merry nod from f.a.n.n.y. "She ought to be nervous. A New York Winter is the open season for other women"s good-looking husbands, it doesn"t do to leave them standing round loose--here of all places!"
VI
f.a.n.n.y"s husband came in shortly after Lucinda and her guests had settled down to coffee and cigarettes in a Palm Room now rapidly regaining its legitimate atmosphere of a lounge, as the extemporized tables were vacated, dismantled, and spirited away.
He fitted so neatly into the mental sketch of Lucinda"s unconscious preconception, that she was naturally prejudiced in his favour. She liked Englishmen of that stamp, even if the stamp was open to criticism as something stereotyped, liked their manner and their manners and the way they dressed, with an effect of finish carelessly attained, as contrasted with the tight ornateness to which American men of the same caste are so largely p.r.o.ne.