Mrs. Pasmer dropped her eyes and fingered the edge of her fan with a submissiveness that seemed to Mrs. Brinkley the perfection of duplicity;she wanted to shake her. "I knew," sighed Mrs. Pasmer, "that you had always been such a friend of his."It is the last straw which breaks the camel's back; Mrs. Brinkley felt her moral vertebrae give way; she almost heard them crack; but if there was really a detonation, the drowned the noise with a harsh laugh. "Oh, he had other friends in Washington. I met him everywhere with Miss Anderson." This statement conflicted with the theory of her single instant with Dan, but she felt that in such a cause, in the cause of giving pain to a woman like Mrs. Pasmer, the deflection from exact truth was justifiable. She hurried on: "I rather expected he might run down here, but now that they're gone, I don't suppose he'll come. You remember Miss Anderson's aunt, Miss Van Hook?""Oh yes," said Mrs. Pasmer.
"She was here with her."
"Miss Van Hook was such a New York type--of a certain kind," said Mrs.
Pasmer. She rose, with a smile at once so conventional, so heroic, and so pitiful that Mrs. Brinkley felt the remorse of a generous victor.
She went to her room, hardening her heart, and she burst in with a flood of voluble exasperation that threatened all the neighbouring rooms with overflow.
"Well, she cried, "they have shown their hands completely. They have come here to hound Dan Mavering down, and get him into their toils again. Why, the woman actually said as much! But I fancy I have given her a fit of insomnia that will enable her to share her daughter's vigils. Really such impudence I never heard of!""Do you want everybody in the corridor to hear of it?" asked Brinkley, from behind a newspaper.
"I know one thing," continued Mrs. Brinkley, dropping her voice a couple of octaves. They will never get him here if I can help it. He won't come, anyway, now Miss Anderson is gone; but I'll make assurance doubly sure by writing him not to come; I'll tell him they've gone; and than we are going too.""You had better remember the man in Chicago," said her husband.
"Well, this is my business--or I'll make it my business!" cried Mrs.
Brinkley. She went on talking rapidly, rising with great excitement in her voice at times, and then remembering to speak lower; and her husband apparently read on through most of her talk, though now and then he made some comment that seemed of almost inspired aptness.
"The way they both made up to me was disgusting. But I know the girl is just a tool in her mother's hands. Her mother seemed actually passive in comparison. For skilful wheedling I could fall down and worship that woman; I really admire her. As long as the girl was with us she kept herself in the background and put the girl at me. It was simply a masterpiece.""How do you know she put her at you?" asked Brinkley.
"How? By the way she seemed not to do it! And because from what I know of that stupid Pasmer pride it would be perfectly impossible for any one who was a Pasmer to take her deprecatory manner toward me of herself. You ought to have seen it! It was simply perfect.""Perhaps," said Brinkley, with a remote dreaminess, "she was truly sorry.""Truly stuff! No, indeed; she hates me as much as ever--more!""Well, then, may be she's doing it because she hates you--doing it for her soul's good--sort of penance, sort of atonement to Mavering."Mrs. Brinkley turned round from her dressing-table to see what her husband meant, but the newspaper hid him. We all know that our own natures are mixed and contradictory, but we each attribute to others a logical consistency which we never find in any one out of the novels. Alice Pasmer was cold and reticent, and Mrs. Brinkley, who had lived half a century in a world full of paradoxes, could not imagine her subject to gusts of passionate frankness; she knew the girl to be proud and distant, and she could not conceive of an abject humility and longing for sympathy in her heart. If Alice felt, when she saw Mrs. Brinkley, that she had a providential opportunity to punish herself for her injustice to Dan, the fact could not be established upon Mrs. Brinkley's theory of her. If the ascetic impulse is the most purely selfish impulse in human nature, Mrs.
Brinkley might not have been mistaken in suspecting her of an ignoble motive, though it might have had for the girl the last sublimity of self-sacrifice. The woman who disliked her and pitied her knew that she had no arts, and rather than adopt so simple a theory of her behaviour as her husband had advanced she held all the more strenuously to her own theory that Alice was practising her mother's arts. This was inevitable, partly from the sense of Mrs. Pasmer's artfulness which everybody had, and partly from the allegiance which we pay--and women especially like to pay--to the tradition of the playwrights and the novelists, that social results of all kinds are the work of deep, and more or less darkling, design on the part of other women--such other women as Mrs. Pasmer.
Mrs. Brinkley continued to talk, but the god spoke no more from behind the newspaper; and afterward Mrs. Brinkley lay a long time awake; hardening her heart. But she was haunted to the verge of her dreams by that girl's sick look, by her languid walk, and by the effect which she had seen her own words take upon Mrs. Pasmer--an effect so admirably disowned, so perfectly obvious. Before she could get to sleep she was obliged to make a compromise with her heart, in pursuance of which, when she found Mrs.
Pasmer at breakfast alone in the morning, she went up to her, and said, holding her hand a moment, "I hope your daughter slept well last night.""No," said Mrs. Pasmer, slipping her hand away, "I can't say that she did." There was probably no resentment expressed in the way she withdrew her hand, but the other thought there was.
"I wish I could do something for her," she cried.
"Oh, thank you," said Mrs. Pasmer. "It's very good of you." And Mrs.
Brinkley fancied she smiled rather bitterly.
