The Adventures of a Widow Part 8

Kindelon told me that I would find no literary society in New York. But I contested this point. I'm inclined to contest it still, though you have shaken my faith, I admit."

"The word 'literary' is very specializing," said Mrs. Dares. She had drooped her large, musing eyes.

"Do you mean that for an evasion?" asked Pauline with a tart pungency that she at once regretted as almost discourteous. "Allow," she went on, promptly softening her tone, "that the word does cover a mult.i.tude of definitions as I use it--that it is used _faute de mieux_, and that no society has ever existed anywhere which one could call strictly literary. Come, then, my dear Mrs. Dares, allowing all this, do you consider that Mr. Kindelon was right? Is it all chaos to-day in New York? Is there no gleam of order?" And here Pauline broke into a furtive tremor of laughter. "Must I begin my good work at the very earliest possible beginning if I am to commence at all?"

Mrs. Dares's dark eyes seemed to smile now, if her lips did not. "Yes,"

she said. "Mr. Kindelon was right. You are to begin at the very beginning.--In London it is so different," she went on, lapsing into the meditative seriousness from which nothing could permanently distract her. "I spent a happy and memorable month there not many years ago. It was a delicious holiday, taken because of overwork here at home, and a blessed medicine I found it. I had brought with me a few lucky letters.

They opened doors to me, and beyond those doors I met faces and voices full of a precious welcome. You would know the names of not a few of those who were gracious to me; they are names that are household words.

And there, in London, I saw, strongly established, a dignified, important and influential society. Rarely, once in a while, I met some man or woman with a t.i.tle, but he or she had always either done something to win the t.i.tle, or something--if it was inherited--to outshine it. I did not stay long enough to pick flaws, to cavil; I enjoyed and appreciated--and I have never forgotten!"

Just at this point, and somewhat to Pauline's secret annoyance, Kindelon returned with a lady at his side. Pauline was soon told the lady's name, and as she heard it her annoyance was swiftly dissipated by a new curiosity. She at once concluded that Miss Cora Dares bore very slight resemblance to her mother. She was taller, and her figure was of a full if not generous moulding. Her rippled chestnut hair grew low over the forehead; almost too low for beauty, though her calm, straight-featured face, lit by a pair of singularly luminous blue eyes, and ending in a deep-dimpled chin of exquisite symmetry, needed but a glance to make good its attractive claim. Miss Cora Dares was quite profuse in her smiles; she gave Pauline, while taking the latter's hand, a very bright and charming one, which made her look still less like her mother.

"We saw you and mamma talking very earnestly together, Mrs. Varick," she said, with a brief side-glance toward Kindelon, "and so we concluded that it would be safe to leave you undisturbed for at least a little while. But mamma is curiously unsafe as an entertainer." This was said with an extremely sweet and amiable look in Mrs. Dares's direction. "She sometimes loses herself in gentle rhapsodies. My sister Martha and I have to keep watch upon her by turns, out of pity for the unliberated victims."

"I need not tell you how I scorn the injustice of that charge, my dear Mrs. Dares!" here cried Kindelon. "It would be late in the day to inform you of my devoted admiration!"

"I fear it is early in the day for me to speak of mine," said Pauline; but the laugh that went with her words (or was it the words themselves?) rang sincerely, and took from what she said the levity of mere idle compliment.

"But you will surely care to meet some of our friends, Mrs. Varick," now said Cora Dares.

"Oh, by all means, yes!" exclaimed Pauline. The girl's limpid, steadfast eyes fascinated her, and she gazed into their lucent depths longer than she was perhaps aware. It was almost like an abrupt awakening to find that she and Mrs. Dares's youngest daughter were standing alone together, Kindelon and the elder lady having gone. "I want very much to meet many of your friends," Pauline proceeded. She put her head a little on one side, while her lips broke into a smile that her companion appeared to understand perfectly and to answer with mute, gay intelligence. "I suppose you have heard all about me and my grand project, just as your charming mother has heard, Miss Dares?"

"Oh, yes," returned Cora.

"And you think it practicable?"

"I think it praiseworthy."

"Which means that I shall fail."

Cora looked humorously troubled. "If you do, it will not be your fault.

I am not doubtful on that point."

"Your mother has by no means encouraged me. She says that I must be careful in my selections, but she gives me very little hope of finding many worthy subjects to select. She seems to think that when the wheat has been taken from the tares, as it were, there will be very little wheat left."

"Yes, I know mamma's opinions. I don't quite share them. My sister Martha does, however, thoroughly.--Ah, here is Martha now. Let me make you acquainted."

Martha Dares proved to be still more unlike her mother than Cora, save as regarded her stature, which was very short. She had a plump person, and a face which was prepossessing solely from its expression of honest good-nature. It was a face whose fat cheeks, merry little black eyes and shapeless nose were all a stout defiance of the cla.s.sic type. Pauline at once decided that Martha was shrewd, energetic and cheerful, and that she might reveal, under due provocation, a temper of hot flash and acute sting.

"And now you know the whole family, Mrs. Varick," said Cora, when her sister had been presented.

"Yes, I complete the group," said Miss Dares, with a jocund trip of the tongue about her speech, that suggested a person who did all her thinking in the same fleet and impetuous way. "I hope you find it an interesting group, Mrs. Varick?"

"Very," said Pauline. "Its members have so much individuality. They are all three so different."

"True enough," hurried Martha. "We react upon each other, for this reason, in a very salutary way. You've no idea what a corrective agent my practical turn is for this poetic sister of mine, who would be up in the clouds nearly all the time, trying to paint the unpaintable, but for an occasional downward jerk from me, you know, such as a boy will give to a refractory kite. But I'll grant you that Cora has more than partially convinced me that life isn't entirely made up of spelling, arithmetic, geography and the use of the globes--for I'm a school-teacher, please understand, though in a rather humble way. And there's poor dear mamma. Goodness knows what would become of _her_ if it were not for both of us. She hasn't an idea how to economize her wonderful powers of work. Cora and I have established a kind of military despotism; we have to say 'halt' and 'shoulder your pen,' just as if she were a sort of soldier. But it will never do for me to rattle on like this. I'm as bad, after my own fashion, as our mutual friend, Mr.

Kindelon, when I once really get started. By the way, you know Mr.

Kindelon very well indeed, don't you?"

"Very well, though I have not known him very long," answered Pauline.

She somehow felt that Martha's question concealed more interest than its framer wished to betray. The little black eyes had taken a new keenness, but the genial face had sobered as well. And for some reason just at this point both Martha and Pauline turned their looks upon Cora.

She had slightly flushed; the change, however, was scarcely noticeable.

She at once spoke, as though being thus observed had made her speak.

"He always has something pleasant to say of you," softly declared Cora.

Here she turned to her sister. "Will you bring up some people to Mrs.

Varick," she asked, "or shall I?"

"Oh, just as you choose," answered Martha. She had fixed her eyes on Pauline again. The next moment Cora had glided off.

"What my sister says is quite true," affirmed Martha.

"You mean--?" Pauline questioned, with a faint start which she could scarcely have explained.

"That Mr. Kindelon admires you very much."

"I am glad to hear it," returned Pauline, thinking how commonplace the sentence sounded, and at the same time feeling her color rise and deepen under the persistent scrutiny of those sharp dark eyes.

"Don't you think him intensely able?" said Martha, much more slowly than usual. "We do."

Pauline bowed a.s.sent. "Brilliantly able," she answered. "Tell me, Miss Dares, with which of you is he the more intimate, your sister or yourself?"

Martha gave a laugh that was crisp and curt. She looked away from Pauline as she answered. "Oh, he's more intimate with me than with Cora," she said. "We are stanch friends. He tells me nearly everything.

I think he would tell me if he were to fall in love."

"Really?" laughed Pauline. Her face was wreathed in smiles of apparent amus.e.m.e.nt. She looked, just then, as she had often looked in the fashionable world, when everything around her seemed so artificial that she took the tints of her environment and became as artificial herself.

But it pleased her swiftly to change the subject. "I am quite excited this evening," she went on. "I am beginning a new career; you understand, of course. Tell me, Miss Dares, how do _you_ think I shall succeed in it?"

Martha was watching her fixedly. And Martha's reply had a short, odd sound. "I think you are almost clever enough not to fail," she said.

VII.

Before Pauline had been an hour longer in the Dares's drawing-room she had become acquainted with many new people. She could not count them all when she afterward tried to do so; the introductions had been very rapid for some little time; one, so to speak, had trodden upon the heel of another. Her meditated project had transpired, and not a few of her recent acquaintances eyed her with a critical estimate of her capability to become their future leader.

She soon found herself an object of such general scrutiny that she was in danger of growing embarra.s.sed to the verge of actual bewilderment.

She was now the centre of a little group, and every member of it regarded her with more or less marked attentiveness.

"I've a tragic soul in a comic body, Mrs. Varick," said a fat little spinster, with a round moon of a face and a high color, whose name was Miss Upton. "That is the way I announce myself to all strangers. I should have gone on the stage and played _Juliet_ if it hadn't been for my unpoetic person. But imagine a bouncing, obese Juliet! No; I realized that it would never do. I shall have to die with all my music in me, as it were."

"A great many poets have done that," said a pale young gentleman with very black hair and eyes, and an expression of ironical fatigue which seldom varied. He was Mr. Leander Prawle, and he was known to have written verses for which he himself had unbounded admiration. "Indeed,"

the young poet continued, lifting one thin, white hand to where his moustache was not yet, "it is hard to sing a pure and n.o.ble song with the discords of daily life about one."