Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

V

"Three o'clock, Thomas, say a quarter to."

"Yes, madam."

The footman performed a faultless salute and doubled round to hop into place beside the chauffeur, while the door-porter shut the door with a bang whose nicely calculated volume told all the world within ear-shot that the door-porter of the fashionable hotel of the day was banging the door to Mrs. Bellamy Druce's brougham.

The technique of every calling is similarly susceptible of refinement into an art.

Two Lucinda Druces crossed the sidewalk and passed through the turnstile of bright metal and plate-glass which served as a door at the Forty-sixth street entrance to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel – the one perceptible to mortal vision a slender and fair young person costumed in impeccable taste and going her way with that unstudied grace which is the last expression of man's will to make woman a creature whose love shall adorn him.

To the luncheon-hour mob that milled in the meagre foyer of this hotel, which holds its public by studiously subjecting it to every Continental inconvenience, she presented the poise of a pretty woman who has never known care more galling than uncertainty as to her most becoming adornment. Not even the shadow of that other Lucinda who walked with her, who was no more separate from her than her own shadow, who ceased not to beat her bosom and cry to Heaven for help, was to be detected in the composed, steady eyes that searched swiftly, but without seeming to see, the faces of that congested congregation of fashionables and half-fashionables and would-be fashionables, their apes and sycophants and audience.

Seeing nowhere those whom she was seeking, Lucinda made her way to the lounge; or it would be more true to say a way was made for her by the simple prestige of her presence, by the magic whisper of her name from mouth to mouth commanding a deference neither beauty nor breeding alone could have earned her.

The lounge was at that hour three-quarters invested by an overflow of tables from the dining-room proper, only at its eastern end a few easy chairs and settees had been left for the accommodation of those lucky enough to win past the functionary who guarded the portals, charged with winnowing the sheep from the goats, admitting the elect to this antechamber to the one true Olympus, shunting off the reject to the limbo of the downstairs grill.

Sighting Lucinda from afar, with a bow of ineffable esteem this one glided forward. "Mrs. Sedley and Mrs. Guest are waiting for you, Mrs. Druce." At the same time Lucinda herself discovered her friends occupying a settee, with Fanny Lontaine between them. "Your table is quite ready. Do you wish luncheon to be served at once?"

Lucinda assented pleasantly and passed on. Immediately the headwaiter caught the eye of a subaltern in the middle of the room, and in intimate silence conversed with him without moving a muscle more than the superciliary. The confederate acknowledged this confidence by significantly dropping his lashes, then in even more cryptic fashion flashed on the inspiring intelligence to that statuesque figure which, from the head of the stairs, between lounge and oval dining-room, brooded with basilisk eyes over the business of both. Thus a minor miracle was worked, bringing that one at once to life and down to earth; in another moment the maître-d'hôtel himself was attentive at Lucinda's elbow.

"But I never dreamed you three knew one another!" she was exclaiming in the surprise of finding Fanny Lontaine on terms with those whom she had bidden to meet her. "Fanny, why didn't you tell me – ?"

"But I didn't know – how should I? – your Nelly Guest was Ellen Field married."

"That's so; I'd completely forgotten you both come from Chicago."

"Hush!" Nelly Guest gave a stage hiss. "Someone might hear. You never forget anything, do you? And all these years I've tried so hard to live it down! It's no fair…"

Impressively convoyed, the quartet proceeded to "Mrs. Druce's table" in the oval room. Rumour of gossip and turning of heads attended their progress, flattery to which Lucinda, Nelly and Jean were inured, of which they were aware only as they were of sensuous strains of stringed music, the orderly stir of waiters, the satisfying sheen of silver and napery, the brilliance and brouhaha of that gathering of amiable worldlings, and the heady breath of it, a subtly blended, oddly inoffensive mélange of scents of flowers and scented flesh, smells of cooked food and cigarette smoke.

But in the understanding of Fanny Lontaine, accustomed to admiration as she was, and no stranger to the public life of European capitals, the flutter caused by the passage of her companions through a phase of existence so polite and skeptical conferred upon them an unmistakable cachet. She had been long abroad and out of touch, she had never been on intimate terms with New York ways, but the busy mind at work behind her round eyes of a child was like a sponge for the absorption of delicate nuances and significant signs of all sorts. Life had made it like that.

Six years married, and two years older than Lucinda Druce, Fanny retained, and would till the end, whatever life might hold in store for her, a look of wondering and eager youthfulness. Romance trembled veritably upon her lashes. She had a way of holding her lips slightly apart and looking steadily at one when spoken to, as if nothing more interesting had ever been heard by the ears ambushed in her bobbed, ashen hair. Her eyes of a deep violet shade held an innocence of expression little less than disconcerting. Her body seemed never to have outgrown its adolescence, yet its slightness was quite without any angularity or awkwardness, it achieved roundness without plumpness, a stroke of physical genius. In the question of dress she showed a tendency to begin where the extreme of the mode left off, a fault held venial in view of her apparent immaturity. And then, of course, she had lived so long in England, where people are more broad-minded…

Apparently not talkative but a good listener, she had a knack of making what she did say stick in memory, not so much for its content as for its manner, a sort of shy audacity that pointed observations often racy and a candour sometimes devastating. But unless one happened to be looking at Fanny when she spoke, her remarks were apt to seem less memorable, her humour less pungent.

"It's heavenly," she now declared, coolly staring at their neighbours through the smoke of her cigarette – "simply divine to be home. I'm sure I'd never want to see Europe again if it weren't for Prohibition."

"You're not going to suffer on that account today," Jean Sedley promised, producing from her handbag a little flash of jewelled gold.

"But I shall!" Fanny protested with tragic expression. "It's the frightful hypocrisy that's curdling my soul and ruining my insides. It makes one homesick for England, where people drink too much because they like it, and not to punish themselves for electing a government which conscientiously interprets the will of the people – and leaves them to interpret their wont."

"No dear, thanks." Smilingly Nelly Guest refused to let Jean fill her glass.

"The figure?" Jean enquired in deep sympathy.

"I've positively got to," Nelly sighed. She cast a rueful glance down over her plump, pretty person. "Compassionate Columbia simply must not waddle when she pokes her horn of plenty at famine-stricken China."

"Oh, that wretched pageant!" Lucinda roused from a lapse into communion with the Lucinda who made an unseen fifth. "When is it? I'd forgotten all about it." Nelly Guest named a day two weeks in the future. "And I haven't even thought about my costume! Oh, why do we punish ourselves so for Charity's sweet sake?"

"Because deep down in our hearts we all like to parade our virtues."

"Much virtue in that plural," Nelly Guest commented.

"Well, I don't like parading mine in pageants, I assure you."

"Don't you, honestly, Cindy?" Fanny asked. "I should think you'd love that sort of thing. You used to be perfectly mad about acting."

"So is every woman – isn't she? – at one stage or another of her life convinced she's truly a great actress cheated out of her birthright."

"I know. All the same you know you've got talent. Don't you remember our open-air performance of Much Ado About Nothing? You were a simply ravishing Rosalind."

"Heavens! What do amateur theatricals prove?"

"For one thing," Jean Sedley commented, "how long-suffering one's friends can be."

"And one's enemies. Consider what they sit through just to see us make public guys of ourselves."

"Well!" Nelly Guest lamented: "my pet enemies are going to have a real treat at the pageant unless I can find some way to reduce, inside a fortnight."

"There was a man in London had a marvelous system," Fanny volunteered. "Everybody was going to him last Season. There ought to be somebody like him over here."

Duly encouraged, she launched into a startlingly detailed account of London's latest fad in "treatment"; and Lucinda's thoughts turned back to her other self, insensibly her identity receded into and merged with its identity again and became lost in its preoccupations.

How to go on, how to play out this farce of a life with Bel when faith in him was dead?

Strange that faith should have been shattered finally by such a minor accident as her overhearing that morning's treachery. As if it had been the first time she had known Bel to be guilty of disloyalty to her! But today she could not forget that neither love nor any kindly feeling for his wife, nor even scruples of self-respect, but only dread of a contretemps had decided Bel against lunching Amelie in that very room, making open show o£ his infatuation before all those people who knew them both and who, being human, must have gloated, nudged, and tittered; who, for all Lucinda knew to the contrary, were even now jeering behind their hands, because they knew things about Bel and his gallivantings which all the world knew but his wife. Even the servants – !

Her cheeks kindled with indignation – and blazed still more ardently when she discovered that she had, in her abstraction, been staring squarely at Richard Daubeney, who was lunching with friends at a nearby table.

But Dobbin bowed and smiled in such a way that Lucinda's confusion and her sense of grievance were drowned under by a wave of gratitude. She nodded brightly and gave him a half-laughing glance.

Good old Dobbin! She had never appreciated how much she was missing him till he had turned up again last night and offered to take his old place in her life, on the old terms as nearly as might be, the old terms as necessarily modified by her own change of status.

What a pity!

Those three words were so clearly sighed in her mental hearing that Lucinda, fearing lest she had uttered them aloud, hastily consulted the faces of her companions. But they had exhausted the subject of reducing régimes and passed on naturally – seeing that Nelly and Jean were approaching that stage when such matters become momentous – to that of "facials."

"… Parr's fuller's earth and witch hazel. Make a thick paste of it and add a few drops of tincture of benzoin, then simply plaster it all over your face, but be careful not to get it near your eyes, and let it dry. It only takes a few minutes to harden, and then you crack and peel it off, and it leaves your skin like a baby's."

"Elizabeth Baird charges twenty-five dollars a treatment."

"But my dear, you can see for yourself how stupid it is to pay such prices to a beauty specialist when the materials cost only a few cents at any drug-store, and anybody can apply it, your maid if you don't want to take the trouble yourself…"

What a pity!

But was it? Would she have been happier married to Dobbin? Was it reasonable to assume that Dobbin would not have developed in the forcing atmosphere of matrimony traits quite as difficult as Bel's to deal with? In this wrong-headed world nobody was beyond criticism, and anybody's faults, condonable though they might seem at a distance, could hardly fail of exaggeration into vices through daily observation at close range. Impossible to imagine any two human creatures living together, after the first raptures had begun to wane, without getting on each other's nerves now and then.