She wondered, as he heaped her ermine on her shoulders, if Harry might not have more surprises for her than she had supposed. Perhaps she had taken him too much for granted. After all, she had known him only for a year.
She herself was but three years old in San Francisco, and to her new eyes Harry had seemed an old resident thoroughly established. So firmly established was he in his bachelor quarters, in his clubs, in the demands made upon him by the city's society, that it had never occurred to her he had ever lived anywhere else. Nor had he happened to mention anything of his previous life until to-night, when he had given her, in that mention of a London ball, one flashing glimpse of former experiences.
Impulsively she summed up the possibilities of what these might have been. She gave him a look, incredulous, delighted, as he handed her into the carriage. She had actually got a thrill out of easy-going, matter-of-fact, well-tubbed Harry! It was a comradeship in itself. Not that she would have told him. This capacity of hers for thrills she had found need always to keep carefully covered. In the days when she was a shoeless child—those days of her father's labor in shaft and dump—she had dimly felt her world to be a creature of a keen, a fairly cruel humor, for all things that did not pertain to the essence of the life it struggled for. The wonder of the western flare of day, the magic in the white eyes of the stars before sunrise, the mystery in the pulse of the pounding mine heard in the dark—of such it had been as ruthless as this new world that looked as narrowly forth at as starved a prospect with even keener ridicule. Instinctively she had turned to both the hard, bright face they required. It seemed that in the world at large this faculty of hers was queer. And to be queer, to have anything that other people had not, except money, was to be open to suspicion. And yet from the first she had had to be queer.
Fatherless, motherless, alone upon the pinnacle of her fortune, she had known that such an extraordinary entrance, even at this rather wide social portal, would only be acceptable if toned down, glossed over, and drawn out by a personality sufficiently neutral, sufficiently potent, and sufficiently in need of what she had to give. The successive flickers of the gas-lamps through the carriage window made of Clara's profile so hard and fine a little medallion that it was impossible to conceive it in need of anything. And yet it was just their mutual need that had drawn these two women together, and after three years it was still the only thing that held them. As much of a fight as she had put up with the rest—the people who had taken her in—she had put up the hardest with Clara. Yet of them all Clara was the only one she had failed to capture. Clara was always there in the middle of her affairs, but surveying them from a distance, and Flora's struggle with her had resolved itself into the attempt to keep her from seeing too much, from seeing more than she herself saw. Clara's seeing, thus far, had always been to help, but Flora sometimes wondered whether in an emergency this help could be depended on—whether Clara could give anything without exacting a price.
Their dubious intimacy had created for Flora a special sort of loneliness—a loneliness which lacked the security of solitude; and it was partly as an escape from this that she had accepted Harry Cressy. By herself she could never have escaped. The initiative was not hers. But he had presented himself, he had insisted, had overruled her objections, had captured her before she knew whether she wanted it or not—and held her now, fascinated by his very success in capturing her, and by his beautiful ruddy masculinity. She did not ask herself whether women ever married for greater reasons than these. She only wondered sometimes if he did not stand out more brilliantly against Clara and the others than he intrinsically was. But these moments when she was obliged to defend him to herself were always when he was not with her. Even in the dusky carriage she had been as aware of the splendor of his attraction as now when they had stopped between the high lamps of the club entrance, and she saw clearly the broad lines of his shoulders and the stoop of his square-set head as he stepped swingingly to the pavement. After all, she ought to be glad to think that he was going to stand up as tall and protectingly between her and the world, as now he did between her and the press of people which, like a tide of water, swept them forward down the hall, sucked them back in its eddy, and finally cast them, ruffled like birds that have ridden a storm, on the more generous space of the wide, upward stair.
From here, looking down on the current sweeping past them, the little islands of black coats seemed fairly drowned in the feminine sea around them—the flow of white, of pale blue and rose, and the high chatter, like a cage of birds, that for the evening held possession.
"Ladies' Night!" Harry Cressy mopped his flushed face. "It's awful!"
Flora laughed in the effervescence of her spirits. She wanted to know, teasingly, as they mounted, if this were why he had brought two more to add to the lot. He only looked at her, with his short note of laughter that made her keenly conscious of his right to be proud of her. She was proud of herself, inasmuch as herself was shown in the long trail of daring blue her gown made up the stair, and the powdery blue of the aigrette that shivered in her bright, soft puffs and curls—proud that her daring, as it appeared in these things, was still discriminating enough to make her right.
She could recall a time when she had not even been quite sure of her clothes. Not Clara's subdued rustle at her side could make her doubt them now; but her security was still recent enough to be sometimes conscious of itself. It was so short a time since all these talking groups, that made a personage of her, had had the power to put her quite out of countenance. The women who craned over their shoulders to speak to her—how hard she had had to work to make them see her at all! And now she did not know which she felt more like laughing at, herself or them, for having taken it so seriously. For, when one thought of it, wasn't it absurd that people out of nowhere should suppose themselves exclusive? And people out of nowhere they were, herself and all the rest of them. From causes not far dissimilar they had drifted or scrambled to where they now stood. It was a question of squatter rights. The first on the ground were dictators, and how long they could hold their claim against invaders a dubious cast of fate. For there were for ever fresh invasions, and departures; swift risings from obscurity, sudden fallings back into oblivion, brilliant shootings through of strange meteors; and in the tide of fluctuation, the things that were established or traditional upon this coast of chance were mere islands in the wash of ocean. It was amazing, it was almost frightening, the fluid, unstable quality of life; the rapid, inconsequent changes; yet it was also this very quality of transformation that most stirred and delighted her.
And to-night it was not the picture exhibition, nor the function itself that elated her, but the fancy she had as she looked over the moving mass below her that the crowning excitement of the day, the vanishing mystery, hovered over them all. It was fantastic, but it persisted; for had not the Chatworth ring itself proved that the most ordinary appearances might cover unimagined wonders? Which of those bland, satisfied faces might not change shockingly at the whisper "Chatworth" in its ear? She wanted to confide the naughty thought to Harry. But no, he wasn't the one. If Harry were apprehensive of anything at all it was only of being caught in too hot a crush. He saw no possibilities in the mob below except boredom. He saw no possibilities in the evening but his conventional duty; and Flora could read in his eye his intention of getting through that as comfortably as possible. His suggestion that they have a look at the pictures brought the two women's eyes together in a rare gleam of mutual mirth. They knew he suspected that the picture gallery would be the emptiest place in the club, since to have a look at the pictures was what they were all supposed to be there for. That was so infallibly the note of their life, Flora thought, as she followed up the wide sweep of the middle stair, and along the high-ceiled, gilded hall whose open arches overlooked the rooms below.
The picture gallery was new, an addition; and the plain, narrow, unexpected door in this place, where all was high, arched, elaborate and flourished, was like a loophole through which to slip into a foreign atmosphere. This atmosphere was resinous of fresh wood; the light was thick with drifting motes; the carpets harshly new, slipping beneath the feet on the too polished floor; the bare bones of the place yet scarcely covered. But its quiet was after all comparative. There were plenty of people lingering in groups in the center of the gallery which was dusky,