“You dance delightfully,” she said. “Is this a part of your life on the ocean wave?”
“Deep-sea-going dancing,” he replied, with a heavenly smile. “All battles are accompanied by balls, don’t you know?”
“Oh, what a wretched jest!” she replied. “It’s unbelievably bad.”
“Not for me. I can make much worse ones.”
“Not for me,” she replied, “I can’t stand them.” And they went prancing on. Afterward he came and sat by her; they walked in the moonlight, he told her of naval life, his Southern home and connections.
Mrs. Carter, seeing him with Berenice, and having been introduced, observed the next morning, “I like your Lieutenant, Bevy. I know some of his relatives well. They come from the Carolinas. He’s sure to come into money. The whole family is wealthy. Do you think he might be interested in you?”
“Oh, possibly—yes, I presume so,” replied Berenice, airily, for she did not take too kindly to this evidence of parental interest. She preferred to see life drift on in some nebulous way at present, and this was bringing matters too close to home. “Still, he has so much machinery on his mind I doubt whether he could take any serious interest in a woman. He is almost more of a battle-ship than he is a man.”
She made a mouth, and Mrs. Carter commented gaily: “You rogue! All the men take an interest in you. You don’t think you could care for him, then, at all?”
“Why, mother, what a question! Why do you ask? Is it so essential that I should?”
“Oh, not that exactly,” replied Mrs. Carter, sweetly, bracing herself for a word which she felt incumbent upon her; “but think of his position. He comes of such a good family, and he must be heir to a considerable fortune in his own right. Oh, Bevy, I don’t want to hurry or spoil your life in any way, but do keep in mind the future. With your tastes and instincts money is so essential, and unless you marry it I don’t know where you are to get it. Your father was so thoughtless, and Rolfe’s was even worse.”
She sighed.
Berenice, for almost the first time in her life, took solemn heed of this thought. She pondered whether she could endure Braxmar as a life partner, follow him around the world, perhaps retransferring her abode to the South; but she could not make up her mind. This suggestion on the part of her mother rather poisoned the cup for her. To tell the truth, in this hour of doubt her thoughts turned vaguely to Cowperwood as one who represented in his avid way more of the things she truly desired. She remembered his wealth, his plaint that his new house could be only a museum, the manner in which he approached her with looks and voiceless suggestions. But he was old and married—out of the question, therefore—and Braxmar was young and charming. To think her mother should have been so tactless as to suggest the necessity for consideration in his case! It almost spoiled him for her. And was their financial state, then, as uncertain as her mother indicated?
In this crisis some of her previous social experiences became significant. For instance, only a few weeks previous to her meeting with Braxmar she had been visiting at the country estate of the Corscaden Batjers, at Redding Hills, Long Island, and had been sitting with her hostess in the morning room of Hillcrest, which commanded a lovely though distant view of Long Island Sound.
Mrs. Fredericka Batjer was a chestnut blonde, fair, cool, quiescent—a type out of Dutch art. Clad in a morning gown of gray and silver, her hair piled in a Psyche knot, she had in her lap on this occasion a Java basket filled with some attempt at Norwegian needlework.
“Bevy,” she said, “you remember Kilmer Duelma, don’t you? Wasn’t he at the Haggertys’ last summer when you were there?”
Berenice, who was seated at a small Chippendale writing-desk penning letters, glanced up, her mind visioning for the moment the youth in question. Kilmer Duelma—tall, stocky, swaggering, his clothes the loose, nonchalant perfection of the season, his walk ambling, studied, lackadaisical, aimless, his color high, his cheeks full, his eyes a little vacuous, his mind acquiescing in a sort of genial, inconsequential way to every query and thought that was put to him. The younger of the two sons of Auguste Duelma, banker, promoter, multimillionaire, he would come into a fortune estimated roughly at between six and eight millions. At the Haggertys’ the year before he had hung about her in an aimless fashion.
Mrs. Batjer studied Berenice curiously for a moment, then returned to her needlework. “I’ve asked him down over this week-end,” she suggested.
“Yes?” queried Berenice, sweetly. “Are there others?”
“Of course,” assented Mrs. Batjer, remotely. “Kilmer doesn’t interest you, I presume.”
Berenice smiled enigmatically.
“You remember Clarissa Faulkner, don’t you, Bevy?” pursued Mrs. Batjer. “She married Romulus Garrison.”
“Perfectly. Where is she now?”
“They have leased the Chateau Brieul at Ars for the winter. Romulus is a fool, but Clarissa is so clever. You know she writes that she is holding a veritable court there this season. Half the smart set of Paris and London are dropping in. It is so charming for her to be able to do those things now. Poor dear! At one time I was quite troubled over her.”
Without giving any outward sign Berenice did not fail to gather the full import of the analogy. It was all true. One must begin early to take thought of one’s life. She suffered a disturbing sense of duty. Kilmer Duelma arrived at noon Friday with six types of bags, a special valet, and a preposterous enthusiasm for polo and hunting (diseases lately acquired from a hunting set in the Berkshires). A cleverly contrived compliment supposed to have emanated from Miss Fleming and conveyed to him with tact by Mrs. Batjer brought him ambling into Berenice’s presence suggesting a Sunday drive to Saddle Rock.
“Haw! haw! You know, I’m delighted to see you again. Haw! haw! It’s been an age since I’ve seen the Haggertys. We missed you after you left. Haw! haw! I did, you know. Since I saw you I have taken up polo—three ponies with me all the time now—haw! haw!—a regular stable nearly.”
Berenice strove valiantly to retain a serene interest. Duty was in her mind, the Chateau Brieul, the winter court of Clarissa Garrison, some first premonitions of the flight of time. Yet the drive was a bore, conversation a burden, the struggle to respond titanic, impossible. When Monday came she fled, leaving three days between that and a week-end at Morristown. Mrs. Batjer—who read straws most capably—sighed. Her own Corscaden was not much beyond his money, but life must be lived and the ambitious must inherit wealth or gather it wisely. Some impossible scheming silly would soon collect Duelma, and then— She considered Berenice a little difficult.
Berenice could not help piecing together the memory of this incident with her mother’s recent appeal in behalf of Lieutenant Braxmar. A great, cloying, disturbing, disintegrating factor in her life was revealed by the dawning discovery that she and her mother were without much money, that aside from her lineage she was in a certain sense an interloper in society. There were never rumors of great wealth in connection with her—no flattering whispers or public notices regarding her station as an heiress. All the smug minor manikins of the social world were on the qui vive for some cotton-headed doll of a girl with an endless bank-account. By nature sybaritic, an intense lover of art fabrics, of stately functions, of power and success in every form, she had been dreaming all this while of a great soul-freedom and art-freedom under some such circumstances as the greatest individual wealth of the day, and only that, could provide. Simultaneously she had vaguely cherished the idea that if she ever found some one who was truly fond of her, and whom she could love or even admire intensely—some one who needed her in a deep, sincere way—she would give herself freely and gladly. Yet who could it be? She had been charmed by Braxmar, but her keen, analytic intelligence required some one harder, more vivid, more ruthless, some one who would appeal to her as an immense force. Yet she must be conservative, she must play what cards she had to win.