"The banjo,decidedly.Which of them plays?""Neither.But the eldest heard that the banjo was 'all the rage,'as the youngest says.Perhaps you can persuade them that good works are the rage,too."Beaton had no very lively belief that Margaret would go to see the Dryfooses;he did so few of the things he proposed that he went upon the theory that others must be as faithless.Still,he had a cruel amusement in figuring the possible encounter between Margaret Vance,with her intellectual elegance,her eager sympathies and generous ideals,and those girls with their rude past,their false and distorted perspective,their sordid and hungry selfishness,and their faith in the omnipotence of their father's wealth wounded by their experience of its present social impotence.At the bottom of his heart he sympathized with them rather than with her;he was more like them.
People had ceased coming,and some of them were going.Miss Vance said she must go,too,and she was about to rise,when the host came up with March;Beaton turned away.
"Miss Vance,I want to introduce Mr.March,the editor of 'Every Other Week.'You oughtn't to be restricted to the art department.We literary fellows think that arm of the service gets too much of the glory nowadays."His banter was for Beaton,but he was already beyond ear-shot,and the host went on:
Mr.March can talk with you about your favorite Boston.He's just turned his back on it.""Oh,I hope not!"said Miss Vance."I can't imagine anybody voluntarily leaving Boston.""I don't say he's so bad as that,"said the host,committing March to her."He came to New York because he couldn't help it--like the rest of us.I never know whether that's a compliment to New York or not."They talked Boston a little while,without finding that they had common acquaintance there;Miss Vance must have concluded that society was much larger in Boston than she had supposed from her visits there,or else that March did not know many people in it.But she was not a girl to care much for the inferences that might be drawn from such conclusions;she rather prided herself upon despising them;and she gave herself to the pleasure of being talked to as if she were of March's own age.
In the glow of her sympathetic beauty and elegance he talked his best,and tried to amuse her with his jokes,which he had the art of tingeing with a little seriousness on one side.He made her laugh;and he flattered her by making her think;in her turn she charmed him so much by enjoying what he said that he began to brag of his wife,as a good husband always does when another woman charms him;and she asked,Oh was Mrs.March there;and would he introduce her?
She asked Mrs.March for her address,and whether she had a day;and she said she would come to see her,if she would let her.Mrs.March could not be so enthusiastic about her as March was,but as they walked home together they talked the girl over,and agreed about her beauty and her amiability.Mrs.March said she seemed very unspoiled for a person who must have been so much spoiled.They tried to analyze her charm,and they succeeded in formulating it as a combination of intellectual fashionableness and worldly innocence."I think,"said Mrs.March,"that city girls,brought up as she must have been,are often the most innocent of all.They never imagine the wickedness of the world,and if they marry happily they go through life as innocent as children.
Everything combines to keep them so;the very hollowness of society shields them.They are the loveliest of the human race.But perhaps the rest have to pay too much for them.""For such an exquisite creature as Miss Vance,"said March,"we couldn't pay too much."A wild laughing cry suddenly broke upon the air at the street-crossing in front of them.A girl's voice called out:"Run,run,Jen!The copper is after you."A woman's figure rushed stumbling across the way and into the shadow of the houses,pursued by a burly policeman.
"Ah,but if that's part of the price?"
They went along fallen from the gay spirit of their talk into a silence which he broke with a sigh."Can that poor wretch and the radiant girl we left yonder really belong to the same system of things?How impossible each makes the other seem!"VI.
Mrs.Horn believed in the world and in society and its unwritten constitution devoutly,and she tolerated her niece's benevolent activities as she tolerated her aesthetic sympathies because these things,however oddly,were tolerated--even encouraged--by society;and they gave Margaret a charm.They made her originality interesting.
Mrs.Horn did not intend that they should ever go so far as to make her troublesome;and it was with a sense of this abeyant authority of her aunt's that the girl asked her approval of her proposed call upon the Dryfooses.She explained as well as she could the social destitution of these opulent people,and she had of course to name Beaton as the source of her knowledge concerning them.
"Did Mr.Beaton suggest your calling on them?""No;he rather discouraged it."
"And why do you think you ought to go in this particular instance?New York is full of people who don't know anybody."Margaret laughed."I suppose it's like any other charity:you reach the cases you know of.The others you say you can't help,and you try to ignore them.""It's very romantic,"said Mrs.Horn."I hope you've counted the cost;all the possible consequences."
