“This is a pretty bad business. The Lindons have got their proofs all right,” he said.
Pauline reddened, and her face lost its look of undaunted serenity. “How can you believe such rubbish, Dexter? If you’re going to take Fanny Lindon’s word against mine — ”
“It’s not a question of your word or hers. Lindon is fully documented: he didn’t come to me till he was. I’m sorry, Pauline; but you’ve been deceived. This man has got to be shown up, and the Lindons have had the pluck to do what everybody else has shirked.”
Pauline’s angry colour had faded. She got up and stood before her husband, distressed and uncertain; then, with a visible effort at self-command, she seated herself again, and locked her hands about her gold-mounted bag.
“Then you’d rather the scandal, if there is one, should be paraded before the world? Who will gain by that except the newspaper reporters, and the people who want to drag down society? And how shall you feel if Nona is called as a witness — or Lita?”
“Oh, nonsense — ” He stopped abruptly, and got up too. The discussion was lasting longer than he had intended, and he could not find the word to end it. His mind felt suddenly empty — empty of arguments and formulas. “I don’t know why you persist in bringing in Nona — or Lita — ”
“I don’t; it’s you. You will, that is, if you take this case. Bee and Nona have been intimate since they were babies, and Bee is always at Lita’s. Don’t you suppose the Mahatma’s lawyers will make use of that if you OBLIGE him to fight? You may say you’re prepared for it; and I admire your courage — but I can’t share it. The idea that our children may be involved simply sickens me.”
“Neither Nona nor Lita has ever had anything to do with this charlatan and his humbug, as far as I know,” said Manford irritably.
“Nona has attended his eurythmic classes at our house, and gone to his lectures with me: at one time they interested her intensely.” Pauline paused. “About Lita I don’t know: I know so little about Lita’s life before her marriage.”
“It was presumably that of any of Nona’s other girl friends.”
“Presumably. Kitty Landish might enlighten us. But of course, if it WAS— ” he noted her faintly sceptical emphasis — “I don’t admit that that would preclude Lita’s having known the Mahatma, or believed in him. And you must remember, Dexter, that I should be the most deeply involved of all! I mean to take a rest-cure at Dawnside in March.” She gave the little playful laugh with which she had been used, in old times, to ridicule the naughtiness of her children.
Manford drummed on his blotting-pad. “Look here, suppose we drop this for the present — ”
She glanced at her wrist-watch. “If you can spare the time — ”
“Spare the time?”
She answered softly: “I’m not going away till you’ve promised.”
Manford could remember the day when that tone — so feminine under its firmness — would have had the power to shake him. Pauline, in her wifely dealings, so seldom invoked the prerogative of her grace, her competence, her persuasiveness, that when she did he had once found it hard to resist. But that day was past. Under his admiration for her brains, and his esteem for her character, he had felt, of late, a stealing boredom. She was too clever, too efficient, too uniformly sagacious and serene. Perhaps his own growing sense of power — professional and social — had secretly undermined his awe of hers, made him feel himself first her equal, then ever so little her superior. He began to detect something obtuse in that unfaltering competence. And as his professional authority grew he had become more jealous of interference with it. His wife ought at least to have understood that! If her famous tact were going to fail her, what would be left, he asked himself?
“Look here, Pauline, you know all this is useless. In professional matters no one else can judge for me. I’m busy this afternoon; I’m sure you are too — ”
She settled more deeply into her armchair. “Never too busy for you, Dexter.”
“Thank you, dear. But the time I ask you to give me is outside of business hours,” he rejoined with a slight smile.
“Then I’m dismissed?” She smiled back. “I understand; you needn’t ring!” She rose with recovered serenity and laid a light hand on his shoulder. “Sorry to have bothered you; I don’t often, do I? All I ask is that you should think over — ”
He lifted the hand to his lips. “Of course, of course.” Now that she was going he could say it.
“I’m forgiven?”
He smiled: “You’re forgiven;” and from the threshold she called, almost gaily: “Don’t forget tonight — Amalasuntha!”
His brow clouded as he returned to his chair; and oddly enough — he was aware of the oddness — it was clouded not by the tiresome scene he had been through, but by his wife’s reminder. “Damn that dinner,” he swore to himself.
He turned to the telephone, unhooked it for the third time, and called for the same number.
That evening, as he slipped the key into his front-door, Dexter Manford felt the oppression of all that lay behind it. He never entered his house without a slight consciousness of the importance of the act — never completely took for granted the resounding vestibule, the big hall with its marble staircase ascending to all the light and warmth and luxury which skill could devise, money buy, and Pauline’s ingenuity combine in a harmonious whole. He had not yet forgotten the day when, after one of his first legal successes, he had installed a bathroom in his mother’s house at Delos, and all the neighbours had driven in from miles around to see it.
But luxury, and above all comfort, had never weighed on him; he was too busy to think much about them, and sure enough of himself and his powers to accept them as his right. It was not the splendour of his house that oppressed him but the sense of the corporative bonds it imposed. It seemed part of an elaborate social and domestic structure, put together with the baffling ingenuity of certain bird’s-nests of which he had seen the pictures. His own career, Pauline’s multiple activities, the problem of poor Arthur Wyant, Nona, Jim, Lita Wyant, the Mahatma, the tiresome Grant Lindons, the perennial and inevitable Amalasuntha, for whom the house was being illuminated tonight — all were strands woven into the very pile of the carpet he trod on his way up the stairs. As he passed the dining-room he saw, through half-open doors, the glitter of glass and silver, a shirt-sleeved man placing bowls of roses down the long table, and Maisie Bruss, wan but undaunted, dealing out dinner cards to Powder, the English butler.
VI
Pauline Manford sent a satisfied glance down the table.
It was on such occasions that she visibly reaped her reward. No one else in New York had so accomplished a cook, such smoothly running service, a dinner-table so softly yet brightly lit, or such skill in grouping about it persons not only eminent in wealth or fashion, but likely to find pleasure in each other’s society.
The intimate reunion, of the not-more-than-the-Muses kind, was not Pauline’s affair. She was aware of this, and seldom made the attempt — though, when she did, she was never able to discover why it was not a success. But in the organizing and administering of a big dinner she was conscious of mastery.