Page:The Smart Set (Volume 52, Number 4).djvu/9

THE CHARMED CIRCLE

New York, where she saw, if she did not mix with, the bearers of names that counted for much in the register of social distinction. Occasionally she had lunched with her employer, a lady of expensive tastes, in the really first-class restaurants and hotels. Horace was oiten a trifle annoved that she did not remember more of the fashionable gossip she must have heard.

“How funny you are, Horace,” she said when he had chidden her for this.

1 don't see that at all,” he said stiffly.

“Silly boy,” she returned. *“What good can it do you? You'll never have enough money to last in that crowd ten minutes, even if you got in, which you couldn’t do if you lived to be a million and eight years old. The man in the family T was kept a steam yacht. TI've been on it. You could sleep forty guests on board, and it cost him twenty thousands dollars a month to keep it in commission. Then they had a grouse moor in Scotland, a cottage at New- port. a house on the Avenue, a chateau on the Loire, and a place near Aiken.”

“And did you go to them all?” he asked enviously.

“I had to,” she retorted, “but it was precious little fun for me to be on the outside looking in with no decent clothes to wear.”

“But men made love to you,” he asserted, looking at her appraisingly.

“Not the sort of men I wanted,” she answered, “and not in the sort of way I liked.”

“I'm afraid you’re incurably romantic,” he said, “the sort of girl who wants to love one man only till both of you get old and fat.”

“It’s the best way, Horace,” she said earnestly. “The things I learned when [ was with those people would make vou sick.”

“What things?” he asked eagerly.

“Oh, matrimonial mix-ups and misfits. It cured me of thinking I was going to marry a splendid millionaire.”

He looked at her keenly. ‘“Then you thought about that once?”

“Fool-girls always do. I was a fool-girl once.”

“And what are you now?”

“Just an ordinary girl who will be happy to get a small flat in New York and a man I can love.”

“That’s an ambition that ought not to be difficult,” he sneered.

Hers was a trivial aspiration for one who had heard of Millionaires’ Row, longed to know Newport’s cottagers and take to the waves from Bailey’s Beach.

“You'd like the French and Italian tables d’hôtes,” she said presently. “One meets all sorts of interesting people there.”

“What sort?” he demanded.

“Authors, musicians and artists mostly. At Gollat’s one night Lennison, the cartoonist, drew a dandy cartoon on the tablecloth and dedicated it to me.”

Somehow this did not appeal very strongly to Horace Blackwell. He doubted the breeding of men who habitually decorated restaurant napery, and the price of the dinner made him doubt the pedigree of the wine. By this time he could have told the inquirer the price of the better known vintages.

Effie looked at him and sighed. She supposed he would never understand how much she cared for him or believe that it was with him as a life partner she had grown so tender to the idea of a small comfortable home in New York. She had realized early that his ambitions overleaped her own and in his presence forgot the admiration other men were eager to proffer.

Plainly Horace Blackwell was not for her. When his aunt died he would have ten thousand dollars and a com- fortable home. No great sum of money to support his ambitions, it was true, but riches to the daughter of a poor Episcopalian minister whose God had rewarded him with a dozen children.

A hundred times poor Effie swore she would not see him again and feel herself humiliated by his indifference. But there was a certain magnetism, unconsciously expended on his part, which kept her the companion of his evening whenever her duties allowed it.