"When you talk like that I feel as if I might be tempted to postpone all introductions indefinitely," he responded. He spoke with sudden seriousness, and she felt that mere gallantry had not lain at the root of this answer.

As a matter of course, Kindelon and Courtlandt soon met each other in Pauline's drawing-room. Courtlandt was quite as quiet as usual, and the Irishman perhaps rather unwontedly voluble. Pauline thought she had never heard her new friend talk better. He made his departure before her cousin, and when he had gone Pauline said, with candid enthusiasm:

"Isn't he a wonderful man?"

"Wonderful?" repeated Courtlandt, a trifle drowsily.

She gave him a keen look, and bristled visibly while she did so.

"Certainly!" she declared. "No other word just expresses him. I didn't observe you very closely, Court," she went on, "but I took it for granted that you were being highly interested. I can't imagine your _not_ being."

"He gave me a kind of singing in the ears," said Courtlandt. "I've got it yet. He makes me think of one of those factories where there's a violent hubbub all the time, so that you have to speak loud if you want to be heard."

Pauline was up in arms, then. "I never listened to a more scandalously unjust criticism!" she exclaimed. "Do you mean to tell me, unblushingly, that you do not think him a _very_ extraordinary person?"

"Oh, very," said her cousin.

Pauline gave an exasperated sigh. "I am so used to you," she said, "that I should never even be surprised by you. But you need not pretend that you can have any except one _truthful_ opinion about Mr. Kindelon."

"I haven't," was the reply. "He's what they call a smart newspaper man.

A Bohemian chap, you know. They're nearly all of them just like that.

They can talk you deaf, dumb, and blind, if you only give them a chance."

"I don't think the dumbness required any great effort, as far as _you_ were concerned!" declared Pauline, with sarcastic belligerence.

She never really quarrelled with Courtlandt, because his impregnable stolidity made such a result next to impossible. But she was now so annoyed by her cousin's slighting comments upon Kindelon that her treatment was touched with a decided coolness for days afterward.

Meanwhile her aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie, had undergone considerable discomforting surprise. Mrs. Poughkeepsie had been prepared to find Pauline changed, but by no means changed in her present way. On hearing her niece express certain very downright opinions with regard to the life which she was bent upon hereafter living, this lady at first revealed amazement and afterward positive alarm.

"But my dear Pauline," she said, "you cannot possibly mean that you intend to get yourself talked about?"

"Talked about, Aunt Cynthia? I don't quite catch your drift, really."

"Let me be plainer, then. If you remain out of society, that is one thing. I scarcely went anywhere, as you know, for ten years after my husband's death--not, indeed, until Sallie had grown up and was ready to come out. There is no objection, surely, against closing one's doors upon the world, provided one desires to do so--although I should say that such a step, Pauline, at your age, and after two full years of widowhood, was decidedly a mistake. Still"--

"Pardon me, Aunt Cynthia," Pauline here broke in. "Nothing is further from my wish than to close my doors upon the world. On the contrary, I want to open them very wide indeed."

Mrs. Poughkeepsie lifted in shocked manner both her fair, plump, dimpled hands. She was a stout lady, with that imposing, dowager-like effect of _embonpoint_ which accompanies a naturally tall and majestic stature.

Her type had never in girlhood been a very feminine one, and it now bordered upon masculinity. Her eyes were hard, calm and dark; her arching nose expressed the most serene self-reliance. She was indeed a person with no doubts; she had, in her way, settled the universe. All her creeds were crystallized, and each, metaphorically, was kept in cotton, as though it were a sort of family diamond. She had been a Miss Schenectady, of the elder, wealthy and more conspicuous branch; it was a most notable thing to have been such a Miss Schenectady. She had married a millionaire, and also a Poughkeepsie; this, moreover, was something very important and fine. She had so distinct a "position" that her remaining out of active partic.i.p.ation in social pursuits made no difference whatever as regarded her right to appear and rule whenever she so chose; it had only been necessary for her to lift her spear, when Miss Sallie required her chaperonage, and the Snowes and Briggses had perforce to tremble. And this fact, too, she held as a precious, delectable prerogative.

In not a few other respects she was satisfied regarding herself. There was nothing, for that matter, which concerned herself in any real way, about which she did not feel wholly satisfied. Her environment in her own opinion was of the best, and doubtless in the opinion of a good many of her adherents also. From the necklace of ancestral brilliants which she now wore, sparkling at ball or dinner, on her generous and creamy neck, to the comfortably-cushioned pew in Grace Church, where two good generations of Poughkeepsies had devoutly sat through many years of Sundays, she silently valued and eulogized the gifts which fate had bestowed upon her.

Pauline's present att.i.tude seemed to her something monstrous. It had not seemed monstrous that her niece should give the bloom and vital purity of a sweet maidenhood to a man weighted with years and almost decrepid from past excesses. But that she should seek any other circle of acquaintance except one sanctioned by the immitigable laws of caste, struck her as a bewildering misdemeanor.

"My dear Pauline," she now exclaimed, "you fill me with a positive fear!

Of course, if you shut your doors to the right people you open them to the wrong ones. You have got some strange idea abroad, which you are now determined to carry out--to _exploiter_, my dear! With your very large income there is hardly any dreadful imprudence which you may not commit.

There is no use in telling me that the people whom one knows are not worth knowing. If you have got into that curious vein of thought you have no remedy for it except to refrain from all entertaining and all acceptance of courtesies. But I beg, Pauline, that you will hesitate before you store up for yourself the material of ugly future repentance.

Sallie and I have accepted the Effinghams' box at the opera to-night.

Those poor Effinghams have been stricken by the death of their father; it was so sudden--he was sitting in his library and literally fell dead--he must certainly have left two millions, but of course that has nothing to do with their bereavement, and it was so kind of them to remember us. They know that I have always wanted a proscenium, and that there are no prosceniums, now, to be had for love or money. I have sent our box in the horse-shoe to cousin Kate Ten Eyck; she is so wretchedly cramped in her purse, you know, and still has Lulu on her hands, and will be so grateful--as indeed she wrote me quite gushingly that she _was_, this very afternoon. Now, Pauline, won't you go with us, my dear?"

Pauline went. A noted _prima donna_ sang, lured by an immense nightly reward to disclose her vocal splendors before American audiences. But her encompa.s.sment, as is so apt to be the case here, was pitiably mediocre. She sang with a presentable contralto, a pa.s.sable baritone, an effete ba.s.so, and an almost despicable tenor. The chorus was anachronistic in costume, sorry in voice, and mournfully undrilled. But the _diva_ was so comprehensively talented that she carried the whole performance. At the same time there were those among her hearers who lamented that her transcendent ability should be burlesqued by so shabby and impotent a surrounding. The engagement of this famous lady was meanwhile one of those sad operatic facts for which the American people have found, during years past, no remedy and no preventive. The fault, of course, lies with themselves. When they are sufficiently numerous as true lovers of music they will refuse their countenance to even a great singer except with creditable artistic and scenic support.

Pauline sat in the Effinghams' s.p.a.cious proscenium-box, between Mrs.

Poughkeepsie and her daughter. Sallie Poughkeepsie was a large girl, with her mother's nose, her mother's serenity, her mother's promise of corpulent matronhood. She had immense prospects; it was reported that she had refused at least twenty eligible matrimonial offers while waiting for the parental nod of approval, which had not yet come.

During the first _entr'acte_ a little throng of admirers entered the box. Some of these Pauline knew; others had appeared, as it were, after her time. One was an Englishman, and she presently became presented to him as the Earl of Glenartney. The t.i.tle struck her as beautiful, appealing to her sense of the romantic and picturesque; but she wondered that it had done so when she subsequently bent a closer gaze upon the receding forehead, flaccid mouth and lank frame of the Earl himself. He had certainly as much hard prose about his appearance as poetry in his name. Mrs. Poughkeepsie beamed upon him in a sort of sidelong way all the time that he conversed with Sallie. A magnate of bountiful shirt-bosom and haughty profile claimed her full heed, but she failed to bestow it entirely; the presence of this unmarried Scotch peer at her child's elbow was too stirring an incident; her usual equanimity was in a delightful flutter; ambition had already begun its insidious whispers, for the Earl was known to be still a bachelor.

Pauline, who read her aunt so thoroughly, felt the mockery of this maternal deference. She told herself that there was something dreary and horrible about a state of human worldliness which could thus idolize mere rank and place. She knew well enough that so long as Lord Glenartney were not a complete idiot, and so long as his moral character escaped the worst depravity, he would be esteemed a magnificent match for her cousin.

The Earl remained at Sallie's side all through the succeeding act. When the curtain again fell he still remained, while other gentlemen took the places of those now departing. And among these, to her surprise and pleasure, was Ralph Kindelon.

She almost rose as she extended her hand to her friend. A defiant satisfaction had suddenly thrilled her. She p.r.o.nounced Kindelon's name quite loudly as she presented him to her aunt. Instead of merely bowing to Mrs. Poughkeepsie, Kindelon, with effusive cordiality, put forth his hand. Pauline saw a startled look creep across her aunt's face. The handsome ma.s.sive-framed Irishman was not clad in evening dress. He towered above all the other gentlemen; he seemed, as indeed he almost was, like a creature of another species. His advent made an instant sensation; a universal stare was levelled upon him by these sleek devotees of fashion, among whom he had the air of pushing his way with a presumptuous geniality. He carried a soft "wide-awake" hat in one hand; his clothes were of some dark gray stuff; his neatly but heavily booted feet made dull sounds upon the floor as he now moved backward in search of a chair. There was no possible doubt regarding his perfect self-possession; he had evidently come to remain and to a.s.sert himself.

"Who on earth is he?" Mrs. Poughkeepsie found a chance to swiftly whisper in the ear of her niece. There was an absolutely dramatic touch in the agitation which went with her questioning sentence.

Pauline looked steadily at her aunt as she responded: "A very valued friend of mine."

"But, my dear!" faltered Mrs. Poughkeepsie. The fragmentary little vocative conveyed a volume of patrician dismay.

By this time Kindelon had found a chair. He placed it close to Pauline.

"I am so very glad that you discovered me," said Pauline. She spoke in quite loud tones, while everybody listened. Her words had the effect of a distinct challenge, and as such she intended them.

"I am flinging down a gauntlet," she thought, "to sn.o.bbery and conservatism. This slight event marks a positive era in my life."

"I saw you from the orchestra," now said Kindelon, in his heartiest tones. "The distance revealed you to me, though I cannot say it lent the least enchantment, for that would surely be impossible." He now looked towards Mrs. Poughkeepsie, without a trace of awe in his mirthful expression. "You must pardon my gallantry, madam," he proceeded. "Your niece and I, though recent friends, are yet old ones. We have crossed the Atlantic together, and that, in the winter season, is a wondrous promoter of intimacy, as you perhaps know. Perhaps Mrs. Varick has already done me the honor of mentioning our acquaintance."

"Not until now," said Mrs. Poughkeepsie, with a smile that had the glitter of ice in it.

IV.

The orchestra had not yet recommenced, and the curtain would not reascend for at least ten good minutes. A vigorous babble of many voices rose from the many upstairs boxes. In some of these Kindelon's appearance might not have created the least comment. Here it was a veritable bombsh.e.l.l.

The "Poughkeepsie set" was famed for its rigid exclusiveness. Wherever Miss Sallie and her mother went, a little train of courtiers invariably followed them. They always represented an ultra-select circle inside of the larger and still decidedly aristocratic one. Only certain young men ever presumed to approach Sallie at all, and these were truly the darlings of fortune and fashion--young gentlemen of admitted ascendency, whose attentions would have made an obscure girl rapidly prominent, and who, while often distinguished for admirable manners, always contrived to hover near those who were the sovereign reverse of obscure. They would carry only her bouquets, or those of other girls who belonged to the same special and envied clique; they would "take out in the German"

only Sallie and her particular intimates. Bitter jealousies among the contemplating dowagers were often a result of this determined eclecticism. "Why _is_ it that my Kate has to put up with so many second-rate men?" would pa.s.s with tormenting persistence through the mind of this matron. "Why can't my Caroline get any of the great swells to notice her?" would drearily haunt another. And between these two distressed ladies there might meanwhile be seated a third, whose daughter, for reasons of overwhelming wealth or particular attractiveness, always moved clad in a nimbus of sanct.i.ty.

Pauline was perfectly well aware that the coming of her friend had seemed an audacity, and that his unconventionally garrulous tongue was now regarded as a greater one. Courtlandt may have told her that the rival factions had cemented their differences and that all society in New York was more democratic than formerly. Still, it was unimaginable that her aunt Cynthia could ever really change her spots.

Where she trod, there, too, must float the aroma of an individual self-glorification. Pauline was as much delighted by Kindelon's easy daring as by the almost glacial answer of her stately kinswoman; and she at once hastened to say, while looking with a smile at the unembarra.s.sed Kindelon himself,--

"I have scarcely had a chance to tell either my aunt or my cousin how good you were to me on the 'Bothnia.'" Then she lifted her fan, and waved it prettily toward Sallie. "This _is_ my cousin, Miss Poughkeepsie," she went on; she did not wait for the slow accomplishment of Sallie's forced and freezing bow, but at once added: "and here is Lord Glenartney, here Mr. Fyshkille, here Mr. Van Arsdale, here Mr.

Hackensack. Now, I think you know us all, Mr. Kindelon."

As she ended her little speech she met Mrs. Poughkeepsie's eyes fixed upon her in placid consternation. Of course this wholesale introduction, among the chance occupants of an opera box, was a most unprecedented violation of usage. But that was precisely Pauline's wish--to violate usage, if she could do it without recourse to any merely vulgar rupture.

They had all stared at Ralph Kindelon, had treated him as if he were some curious animal instead of a fellow-creature greatly their own superior, and they should have a chance now of discovering just how well he could hold his own in their little self-satisfied a.s.semblage.

Kindelon bowed and smiled in every direction. He appeared unconscious that everybody did not bow and smile with just the same reciprocal warmth.