But she was a very tactful person and was about to drop the subject, when Isabel slowly turned her eyes. They looked so much like steel that for the moment they seemed to have lost their blue.

"I have made up my mind to do something to prevent this marriage," she announced. "I do not know what, as yet. I shall be guided by events."

And Flora devoutly kissed her, then gossipped pleasantly about the other guests and the people in the neighborhood. Isabel was curious to know something of the d.u.c.h.ess she was to meet on the morrow.

"Does she really look like a d.u.c.h.ess?" she asked, so innocently that Flora laughed and forgot the Roman-American profile, and the fateful eyes that had given her an uncomfortable sensation a moment before.

"Well--yes--she does--rather. It is the fashion in these days not to--to be smart above all things, excessively democratic, animated, unaffected, clever. But our d.u.c.h.ess here is rather old-fashioned, very lofty of head and expression. She has a look of floating from peak to peak, and although pa.s.see is still a beauty. To be honest, she is hideously dull, but as good a creature as ever lived, and all that the ideal d.u.c.h.ess should be--so high-minded that she has never suspected the larkiest of her friends."

"Well, I am glad she looks the role. I have artistic cravings."

They drove for an hour through the beautiful quiet green country, past many old stone villages that might have been the direct sequence of the cave era. An automobile skimmed past and the pony sat down on its haunches. Isabel had a glimpse of a delicate high-bred face set like a panel in a parted curtain.

"That is the d.u.c.h.ess," said Miss Thangue. "She wouldn't wear goggles for the world, and only gets into an automobile occasionally to please the duke. There is nothing old-fashioned about him."

"She looks as if her name ought to be Lucy," said Isabel, to whom the pure empty face had appeared like a vision from some former dull existence, and left behind it an echo of insupportable ennui.

XII

Isabel had looked forward all day to the promised talk with the somewhat formidable relative for whom, however, she had conceived one of those enthusiasms peculiar to her age and s.e.x. Her wardrobe was barren of the costly afternoon gowns smart women affect, but she put on an organdie, billowy with many ruffles, that consorted with the season, at least.

Blue cornflowers were scattered over the white transparent surface, and she possessed no more becoming frock. Had she been on her way to a tryst with Lord Hexam she would have thrust a rose in her hair, accentuated the smallness of her waist with a blue ribbon, the whiteness of her throat with a line of black velvet; but she had the instinct of dress, which teaches, among many things, that self-consciousness in external adornment provokes amus.e.m.e.nt in other women.

She had not the least idea where to find Lady Victoria's boudoir, although a casual reference by Flora Thangue suggested that it was on the bedroom floor. She lost herself in the interminable corridors and finally ran into Elton Gwynne.

"Your mother expects me--where is her boudoir?" she asked.

He was at peace with the world, and answered, good-naturedly: "I'll pilot you. Her rooms are over on the other side."

"You look as if you should be congratulated about something," she said, demurely. "There are all sorts of rumors flying about."

She had half-expected to be snubbed, but he was not in the humor to snub anybody. "You can congratulate me!" he said, emphatically. "The most wonderful woman in the world has promised to marry me."

"I hope you will be happy," said Isabel, conventionally. She resented his sudden drop from his pedestal, for he looked sentimental and somewhat sheepish. Still, her youth warmed to his in spite of herself, and again he noticed with a pa.s.sing surprise that her eyes were both lovely and intellectual. He was hardly aware that coincidentally his Julia's eyes met his mental vision with a glance somewhat too hard and brilliant, but he caught Isabel's hand and gave it a little shake.

"Thank you!" he exclaimed. "That was said as if you jolly well meant it.

There are my mother's rooms."

He went off whistling, and Isabel raised her hand and looked at it meditatively; his own had been unexpectedly warm and magnetic. She had imagined that his grasp would be cold and loose.

He had indicated a private corridor, and she entered it and approached a door ajar. There was no response to her knock, but as she was expected, and Lady Victoria no doubt was still dressing, she pushed open the door and entered. The room was empty, but Isabel was instantly impressed with its reflection of an individuality, although of a side that had attracted her least. Here was none of the old-time stiffness of Capheaton, and there was a conspicuous absence of dead masters and their pupils. It was not a large room. The walls were covered with a j.a.panese gold paper to within four feet of the floor where it was met by a tapestry of Indian cashmeres, and from it was separated by a narrow shelf set thick with photographs in silver frames, and with odd and exquisite bibelots. On the walls were artists' sketches, and two or three canvases of the Impressionist and Secessionist schools, expressive of the ardent temperaments of their creators. In the place of honor was a painting of Salambo in the folds of her python.

There were several deep chairs and a mighty divan covered with gold-colored cushions and a tiger-skin, whose mate was on the floor. The gloom of the afternoon was excluded by heavy gold-colored curtains, and the only, but quite sufficient light, filtered through an opalescent globe upheld by a twisted bronze female of the modern Munich school, that looked like nothing so much as Alice elongating in Wonderland.

Isabel suddenly felt herself and her organdie absurdly out of place in this room with its enchantress atmosphere. She wished that Lady Victoria had made the appointment for the library, which was equally in tune with another side of her.

She was even meditating a retreat, inexplicably embarra.s.sed, when an inner door opened and Lady Victoria entered. She wore a tea-gown of a sort, black and yellow, open over the soft lace of a chemisette, although a dog-collar of tiny golden sequins clasped her throat. In her hair a golden b.u.t.terfly trembled, and in that light she would have looked little older than her guest had it not been for the expression of her face. It was this expression that arrested Isabel even more than the toilette, as she moved towards the divan without a word of greeting. It looked as if it had been put on with the costume, both intended to express a mood of the wearer: which might have been that of a tigress whose ferocity was slowly awakening with the approach of the victim. The black eyes were heavy with the l.u.s.t of conquest, the points of the mouth turned up more sharply than usual; there was an insatiable vanity in the commanding poise of her head. She was as little like the woman of the morning as the sun is like the midnight, and Isabel experienced a positive terror of her.

Feeling sixteen and very foolish, she sank to the edge of a chair and muttered something about the charm of the room. Then, as Lady Victoria, who had arranged herself among the shining pillows, continued to stare at her with absolutely no change of expression, it dawned upon her that she had not been expected but that some one else was. With too little presence of mind left to retire gracefully and too much pride to appear to have ventured into the cave of Venus unasked, she managed to articulate her grat.i.tude for the invitation of the morning.

"Oh!" Lady Victoria's eyebrows expressed a flicker of intelligence. "I hope you have managed not to bore yourself."

Isabel plunged into an account of her drive, to which Lady Victoria, who had lit a long Russian cigarette, paid no attention whatever. Her expression was still petrified, except that she might have had the scent of blood in her slightly dilating nostrils.

Suddenly the slow flame in her eyes burned upward, and Isabel, her head fairly jerking about, saw that a man had entered and was advancing rapidly across the room, his heavy eyes wide with admiration. It was the Frenchman whom Lady Victoria had honored with so much of her attention the evening before.

He raised to his lips the pointed fingers negligently extended, and murmured something to which Lady Victoria replied in French as pure and fluent as his own; and in a low rich voice, with not an echo in it of her habitual abruptness or haughty languor.

The Frenchman accepted a cigarette and a low chair opposite the divan, whose golden cushions seemed subtly to embrace the yielding flexible figure against them. Neither took the slightest notice of the third person beyond a muttered introduction and acknowledgment, and as the man embarked on a soft torrent of speech, bearing the burden of his beat.i.tude in at last meeting the only Englishwoman whose fame in Paris was as great as among her native fogs, Isabel rose and retreated with what dignity she could summon. Then Lady Victoria, seeing that she was rid of her, and courteous under all her idiosyncrasies, rose with a long motion of repressed energy and accompanied her to the door, her hand resting lightly against the crisp organdie belt.

"Will you pour out the tea for me?" she asked, sweetly. "I doubt if I go down."

No small part of her dangerous fascination lay in her sincerity. She really liked Isabel, although it was characteristic of her that she did not in the least care at what conclusions that puzzled young woman might arrive in a more solitary meditation.

When Isabel found herself in the long cool corridor, set thick with gentle landscapes, and hunting squires, and dames haughty and humble, she drew a long breath of relief, as if she had escaped from a jungle.

But she felt oddly wounded in her self-love, young and silly. She had thought herself old in the last three years, tremendously modern. What did she know? The easy morals of students in France and Germany had repelled her at first, but she had ended by accepting them as a matter of course, and had rather plumed herself upon her acc.u.mulating grains and blends of human nature. She felt a rush of contempt for their crudity. What children they were with their simple unmorality of artists, as ignorant of the real world as babes in a wood!

When she reached her own room she astonished herself by bursting into a pa.s.sion of tears. It was some time before she understood what had induced it. It was not that the illusions of youth had received a hard blow, for many of them had disappeared long since in Paris, when she had supported an American girl of decent family but too much liberty through the most desperate experience that a young woman, alone and friendless in a foreign city, well could have. The girl had died cursing all men and the folly of women, and after Isabel had buried her and the leading cause of her repentance, she returned to her lonely flat in a state of disillusion and disgust which seemed to encase her by no means susceptible heart in a triple panoply. This state of mind had lasted for at least three months. And there was little of which she had not abstract knowledge, nor had she lived a quarter of a century to learn for the first time of the license which the world permits to women so highly placed that they have come to believe themselves above all laws.

But all her experience and abstract knowledge counted for nothing, and she had for the first time a sudden and complete appreciation of the evil of the world and of its odd a.s.sociation with even the higher virtues; of the fact that in the upper walks of life the balance was more nearly even than on planes where there existed scantier opportunities for development. There was no question that Victoria Gwynne was made on a magnificent plan, as capable of heroism, no doubt, as any of the salient women of history. She was an ornament in her world, useful, sympathetic, the author of much good, a devoted and inspiring mother. And yet there was no more question that this Frenchman was the last of a long line of favored adorers than that Victoria, for all her individualities, was but a type of her kind: a kind that was sufficiently distinct from the hundreds of wholly estimable women that were proud to know her, or accepted her as a matter of course.

And even these good women? Had they not the same pa.s.sions, the same inclinations in the secrecies of their souls? What was the determining cause of their indisputable virtue? A happy marriage? Too many children?

Timidity? Absence of temptation? Or were they merely orthodox through a more uneven balancing of their qualities, the animal in abeyance? For this very reason were they not frequently narrow, unsympathetic, unuseful--unless, indeed, they were of the few who, with the mighty temptations of the Victoria Gwynnes, were mightier still in their fidelity to some inner and cherished ideal. This lofty ideal of womanhood Isabel had unconsciously set up in her soul, and the sudden conviction of its imperfection was, after all, the reason of her sudden despair. For the soul with its immemorial and often incommunicable knowledge may have its moments of terror while the mind wonders.

And she was disheartened at the sense of insignificance and mortification inspired by this contact with a side of life, as real and consequent as motherhood or government, instead of feeling merely repelled, infinitely superior in her unstained maidenhood. She had no wish to emulate, but neither did she relish feeling provincial, a chit, an outsider. Her youthful vanity had its way in a mind too speculative, intelligent, observant, merely to be shocked. Her memory reverted to experiences that had made her feel as much older than the ordinary girl as she now felt at sea. What was she, Isabel Otis, after all? She felt a mere a.s.sortment of fluids, which might or might not crystallize into some such being as she had dimly apprehended, or into something quite commonplace; realized with a shock that her own deep personal experience had left her less definitely moulded than she had imagined.

She rose impatiently and bathed her eyes before ringing for the maid to lace her for dinner--it was long past tea-time. "Perhaps I had better marry Lord Hexam and have ten children," she thought. "That sort of existence has kept more women up to the correct standard than anything else except poverty."

XIII

"And is this really your first big party?" asked Hexam, wonderingly.

"The first! The first! And I am twenty-five! Just think of it! Of course I have been to students' b.a.l.l.s, and little parties in Rosewater. But a function--never before."

"This is hardly a function--parties even in the big political country-houses are more or less informal."

"Informal! The jewels fairly blind my provincial eyes. And this is a real castle!"

"Oh yes, it is a castle," he said, laughing outright. "I suppose you have read up its record?" he added, teasingly. "You industrious and curious Americans know a lot more about us than we know about ourselves."

"Of course I know the history of this castle. I haven't the least doubt you know every word of it yourself. I have already learned that the English are not nearly so vacant-minded as, in their curious pride, they would have one believe."