Pauline felt no more inconsistency in this double train of thought than she did in shuddering at the crimes of the Roman Church and longing to receive one of its dignitaries with all the proper ceremonial. She was used to such rapid adjustments, and proud of the fact that whole categories of contradictory opinions lay down together in her mind as peacefully as the Happy Families exhibited by strolling circuses. And of course, if the Cardinal DID come to her house, she would show her American independence by inviting also the Bishop of New York — her own Episcopal Bishop — and possibly the Chief Rabbi (also a friend of hers), and certainly that wonderful much-slandered “Mahatma” in whom she still so thoroughly believed. . .
But the word pulled her up short. Yes; certainly she believed in the “Mahatma.” She had every reason to. Standing before the tall threefold mirror in her dressing-room, she glanced into the huge bathroom beyond — which looked like a biological laboratory, with its white tiles, polished pipes, weighing machines, mysterious appliances for douches, gymnastics and “physical culture” — and recalled with gratitude that it was certainly those eurythmic exercises of the Mahatma’s (“holy ecstasy,” he called them) which had reduced her hips after everything else had failed. And this gratitude for the reduction of her hips was exactly on the same plane, in her neat card-catalogued mind, with her enthusiastic faith in his wonderful mystical teachings about Self–Annihilation, Anterior Existence and Astral Affinities . . . all so incomprehensible and so pure . . . Yes; she would certainly ask the Mahatma. It would do the Cardinal good to have a talk with him. She could almost hear his Eminence saying, in a voice shaken by emotion: “Mrs. Manford, I want to thank you for making me know that Wonderful Man. If it hadn’t been for you — ”
Ah, she did like people who said to her: “If it hadn’t been for you —!”
The telephone on her dressing-table rang. Miss Bruss had switched on from the boudoir. Mrs. Manford, as she unhooked the receiver, cast a nervous glance at the clock. She was already seven minutes late for her Marcel-waving, and —
Ah: it was Dexter’s voice! Automatically she composed her face to a wifely smile, and her voice to a corresponding intonation. “Yes? Pauline, dear. Oh — about dinner tonight? Why, you know, Amalasuntha . . . You say you’re going to the theatre with Jim and Lita? But, Dexter, you can’t! They’re dining here — Jim and Lita are. But OF COURSE . . . Yes, it must have been a mistake; Lita’s so flighty . . . I know. . .” (The smile grew a little pinched; the voice echoed it. Then, patiently): “Yes; what else? . . . OH . . . oh, Dexter . . . what do you mean? . . . The Mahatma? WHAT? I don’t understand!”
But she did. She was conscious of turning white under her discreet cosmetics. Somewhere in the depths of her there had lurked for the last weeks an unexpressed fear of this very thing: a fear that the people who were opposed to the teaching of the Hindu sage — New York’s great “spiritual uplift” of the last two years — were gaining power and beginning to be a menace. And here was Dexter Manford actually saying something about having been asked to conduct an investigation into the state of things at the Mahatma’s “School of Oriental Thought,” in which all sorts of unpleasantness might be involved. Of course Dexter never said much about professional matters on the telephone; he did not, to his wife’s thinking, say enough about them when he got home. But what little she now gathered made her feel positively ill.
“Oh, Dexter, but I must see you about this! At once! You couldn’t come back to lunch, I suppose? Not possibly? No — this evening there’ll be no chance. Why, the dinner for Amalasuntha — oh, please don’t forget it AGAIN!”
With one hand on the receiver, she reached with the other for her engagement-list (the duplicate of Miss Bruss’s), and ran a nervous unseeing eye over it. A scandal — another scandal! It mustn’t be. She loathed scandals. And besides, she did believe in the Mahatma. He had “vision.” From the moment when she had picked up that word in a magazine article she had felt she had a complete answer about him. . .
“But I must see you before this evening, Dexter. Wait! I’m looking over my engagements.” She came to “4 p.m. See A. 4.30 Musical — Torfried Lobb.” No; she couldn’t give up Torfried Lobb: she was one of the fifty or sixty ladies who had “discovered” him the previous winter, and she knew he counted on her presence at his recital. Well, then — for once “A” must be sacrificed.
“Listen, Dexter; if I were to come to the office at 4? Yes; sharp. Is that right? And don’t do anything till I see you — promise!”
She hung up with a sigh of relief. She would try to readjust things so as to see “A” the next day; though readjusting her list in the height of the season was as exhausting as a major operation.
In her momentary irritation she was almost inclined to feel as if it were Arthur’s fault for figuring on that day’s list, and thus unsettling all her arrangements. Poor Arthur — from the first he had been one of her failures. She had a little cemetery of them — a very small one — planted over with quick-growing things, so that you might have walked all through her life and not noticed there were any graves in it. To the inexperienced Pauline of thirty years ago, fresh from the factory-smoke of Exploit, Arthur Wyant had symbolized the tempting contrast between a city absorbed in making money and a society bent on enjoying it. Such a brilliant figure — and nothing to show for it! She didn’t know exactly what she had expected, her own ideal of manly achievement being at that time solely based on the power of getting rich faster than your neighbours — which Arthur would certainly never do. His father-inlaw at Exploit had seen at a glance that it was no use taking him into the motor-business, and had remarked philosophically to Pauline: “Better just regard him as a piece of jewellery: I guess we can afford it.”
But jewellery must at least be brilliant; and Arthur had somehow — faded. At one time she had hoped he might play a part in state politics — with Washington and its enticing diplomatic society at the end of the vista — but he shrugged that away as contemptuously as what he called “trade.” At Cedarledge he farmed a little, fussed over the accounts, and muddled away her money till she replaced him by a trained superintendent; and in town he spent hours playing bridge at his club, took an intermittent interest in racing, and went and sat every afternoon with his mother, old Mrs. Wyant, in the dreary house near Stuyvesant Square which had never been “done over,” and was still lit by Carcel lamps.
An obstacle and a disappointment; that was what he had always been. Still, she would have borne with his inadequacy, his resultless planning, dreaming and dawdling, even his growing tendency to drink, as the wives of her generation were taught to bear with such failings, had it not been for the discovery that he was also “immoral.” Immorality no high-minded woman could condone; and when, on her return from a rest-cure in California, she found that he had drifted into a furtive love affair with the dependent cousin who lived with his mother, every law of self-respect known to Pauline decreed his repudiation. Old Mrs. Wyant, horror-struck, banished the cousin and pleaded for her son: Pauline was adamant. She addressed herself to the rising divorce-lawyer, Dexter Manford, and in his capable hands the affair was settled rapidly, discreetly, without scandal, wrangling or recrimination. Wyant withdrew to his mother’s house, and Pauline went to Europe, a free woman.
In the early days of the new century divorce had not become a social institution in New York, and the blow to Wyant’s pride was deeper than Pauline had foreseen. He lived in complete retirement at his mother’s, saw his boy at the dates prescribed by the