“What is the matter with Miss Hegan?” asked Montague, laughing.
“She’s an idea she’s too good for the world she lives in,” said Betty. “When you’re with her, you feel as you will before the judgment throne.”
“Undoubtedly a disturbing feeling,” put in the Major.
“She never hands you anything but you find a pin hidden in it,” went on the girl. “All her remarks are meant to be read backward, and my life is too short to straighten out their kinks. I like a person to say what they mean in plain English, and then I can either like them or not.”
“Mostly not,” said the Major, grimly; and added, “Anyway, she’s beautiful.”
“Perhaps,” said the other. “So is the Jungfrau; but I prefer something more comfortable.”
“What’s Chappie de Peyster beauing her around for?” asked Mrs. Venable. “Is he a candidate?”
“Maybe his debts are troubling him again,” said Mistress Betty. “He must be in a desperate plight.—Did you hear how Jack Audubon proposed to her?”
“Did Jack propose?” exclaimed the Major.
“Of course he did,” said the girl. “His brother told me.” Then, for Montague’s benefit, she explained, “Jack Audubon is the Major’s nephew, and he’s a bookworm, and spends all his time collecting scarabs.”
“What did he say to her?” asked the Major, highly amused.
“Why,” said Betty, “he told her he knew she didn’t love him; but also she knew that he didn’t care anything about her money, and she might like to marry him so that other men would let her alone.”
“Gad!” cried the old gentleman, slapping his knee. “A masterpiece!”
“Does she have so many suitors?” asked Montague; and the Major replied, “My dear boy—she’ll have a hundred million dollars some day!”
At this point Oliver put in appearance, and Betty got up and went for a stroll with him; then Montague asked for light upon Miss Hegan’s remark.
“What she said is perfectly true,” replied the Major; “only it riled Betty. There’s many a gallant dame cruising the social seas who has stowed her old relatives out of sight in the hold.”
“What’s the matter with old Simpkins?” asked the other.
“Just a queer boy,” was the reply. “He has a big pile, and his one joy in life is the divine Yvette. It is really he who makes her ridiculous—he has a regular press agent for her, a chap he loads up with jewellery and cheques whenever he gets her picture into the papers.”
The Major paused a moment to greet some acquaintance, and then resumed the conversation. Apparently he could gossip in this intimate fashion about any person whom you named. Old Simpkins had been very poor as a boy, it appeared, and he had never got over the memory of it. Miss Yvette spent fifty thousand at a clip for Paris gowns; but every day her old uncle would save up the lumps of sugar which came with the expensive lunch he had brought to his office. And when he had several pounds he would send them home by messenger!
This conversation gave Montague a new sense of the complicatedness of the world into which he had come. Miss Simpkins was “impossible”; and yet there was—for instance—that Mrs. Landis whom he had met at Mrs. Winnie Duval’s. He had met her several times at the show; and he heard the Major and his sister-in-law chuckling over a paragraph in the society journal, to the effect that Mrs. Virginia van Rensselaer Landis had just returned from a successful hunting-trip in the far West. He did not see the humour of this, at least not until they had told him of another paragraph which had appeared some time before: stating that Mrs. Landis had gone to acquire residence in South Dakota, taking with her thirty-five trunks and a poodle; and that “Leanie” Hopkins, the handsome young stock-broker, had taken a six months’ vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
And yet Mrs. Landis was “in” Society! And moreover, she spent nearly as much upon her clothes as Miss Yvette, and the clothes were quite as conspicuous; and if the papers did not print pages about them, it was not because Mrs. Landis was not perfectly willing. She was painted and made up quite as frankly as any chorus-girl on the stage. She laughed a great deal, and in a high key, and she and her friends told stories which made Montague wish to move out of the way.
Mrs. Landis had for some reason taken a fancy to Alice, and invited her home to lunch with her twice during the show. And after they had got home in the evening, the girl sat upon the bed in her fur-trimmed wrapper, and told Montague and his mother and Mammy Lucy all about her visit.
“I don’t believe that woman has a thing to do or to think about in the world except to wear clothes!” she said. “Why, she has adjustable mirrors on ball-bearings, so that she can see every part of her skirts! And she gets all her gowns from Paris, four times a year—she says there are four seasons now, instead of two! I thought that my new clothes amounted to something, but my goodness, when I saw hers!”
Then Alice went on to describe the unpacking of fourteen trunks, which had just come up from the custom-house that day. Mrs. Virginia’s couturiere had her photograph and her colouring (represented in actual paints) and a figure made up from exact measurements; and so every one of the garments would fit her perfectly. Each one came stuffed with tissue paper and held in place by a lattice-work of tape; and attached to each gown was a piece of the fabric, from which her shoemaker would make shoes or slippers. There were street-costumes and opera-wraps, robes de chambre and tea-gowns, reception-dresses, and wonderful ball and dinner gowns. Most of these latter were to be embroidered with jewellery before they were worn, and imitation jewels were sewn on, to show how the real ones were to be placed. These garments were made of real lace or Parisian embroidery, and the prices paid for them were almost impossible to credit. Some of them were made of lace so filmy that the women who made them had to sit in damp cellars, because the sunlight would dry the fine threads and they would break; a single yard of the lace represented forty days of labour. There was a pastel “batiste de soie” Pompadour robe, embroidered with cream silk flowers, which had cost one thousand dollars. There was a hat to go with it, which had cost a hundred and twenty-five, and shoes of grey antelope-skin, buckled with mother-of-pearl, which had cost forty. There was a gorgeous and intricate ball-dress of pale green chiffon satin, with orchids embroidered in oxidized silver, and a long court train, studded with diamonds—and this had cost six thousand dollars without the jewels! And there was an auto-coat which had cost three thousand; and an opera-wrap made in Leipsic, of white unborn baby lamb, lined with ermine, which had cost twelve thousand—with a thousand additional for a hat to match! Mrs. Landis thought nothing of paying thirty-five dollars for a lace handkerchief, or sixty dollars for a pair of spun silk hose, or two hundred dollars for a pearl and gold-handled parasol trimmed with cascades of chiffon, and made, like her hats, one for each gown.
“And she insists that these things are worth the money,” said Alice. “She says it’s not only the material in them, but the ideas. Each costume is a study, like a picture. ‘I pay for the creative genius of the artist,’ she said to me—’for his ability to catch my ideas and apply them to my personality—my complexion and hair and eyes. Sometimes I design my own costumes, and so I know what hard work it is!’”
Mrs. Landis came from one of New York’s oldest families, and she was wealthy in her own right; she had a palace on Fifth Avenue, and now that she had turned her husband out, she had nothing at all to put in it except her clothes. Alice told about the places in which she kept them—it was like a museum! There was a gown-room, made dust-proof, of polished hardwood, and with tier upon tier of long poles running across, and padded skirt-supporters hanging from them. Everywhere there was order and system—each skirt was numbered, and in a chiffonier-drawer of the same number you would find the waist—and so on with hats and stockings and gloves and shoes and parasols. There was a row of closets, having shelves piled up with dainty lace-trimmed and beribboned lingerie; there were two closets full of hats and three of shoes. “When she went West,” said Alice, “one of her maids counted, and found that she had over four hundred pairs! And she actually has a cabinet with a card-catalogue to keep track of them. And all the shelves are lined with perfumed silk sachets, and she has tiny sachets sewed in every skirt and waist; and she has her own private perfume—she gave me some. She calls it Occur de Jeannette, and she says she designed it herself, and had it patented!”