The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig Part 5

Margaret shrugged her shoulders. "You know I detest champagne and never drink it," said she. "And I don't purpose to begin, even to oblige you."

"To oblige me!"

"To give you pretext for contention and nagging and quarreling."

Madam Bowker was now in the element she had been seeking--the stormy sea of domestic wrangling. She struck out boldly, with angry joy. "I've long since learned not to expect grat.i.tude from you. I can't understand my own weakness, my folly, in continuing to labor with you."

"That's very simple," said Margaret. "I'm the one human being you can't compel by hook or crook to bow to your will. You regard me as unfinished business."

Madam Bowker smiled grimly at this shrewd a.n.a.lysis. "I want to see you married and properly settled in life. I want to end this disgrace. I want to save you from becoming ridiculous and contemptible--an object of laughter and of pity."

"You want to see me married to some man I dislike and should soon hate."

"I want to see you married," retorted the old lady. "I can't be held responsible for your electing to hate whatever is good for you. And I came to tell you that my patience is about exhausted. If you are not engaged by the end of this season, I wash my hands of you. I have been spending a great deal of money in the effort to establish you. You are a miserable failure socially. You attach only worthless men. You drive away the serious men."

"Stupid, you mean."

"I mean serious--the men looking for wives. Men who have something and have a right to aspire to the hand of MY grandchild. The only men who have a right to take the time of an unmarried woman. You either cannot, or will not, exert yourself to please. You avoid young girls and young men. You waste your life with people already settled. You have taken on the full airs and speech of a married woman, in advance of having a husband--and that is folly bordering on insanity. You have discarded everything that men--marrying men--the right sort of men--demand in maidenhood. I repeat, you are a miserable failure."

"A miserable failure," echoed Margaret, staring dismally into the gla.s.s.

"And I repeat," continued the old lady, somewhat less harshly, though not less resolutely, "this season ends it. You must marry or I'll stop your allowance. You'll have to look to your mother for your dresses and hats and gee-gaws. When I think of the thousands of dollars I've wasted on you--It's cheating--it's cheating! You have been stealing from me!"

Madam Bowker's tone was almost unladylike; her ebon staff was flouris.h.i.+ng threateningly.

Margaret started up. "I warned you at the outset!" she cried. "I took nothing from you that you didn't force on me. And now, when you've made dress, and all that, a necessity for me, you are going to s.n.a.t.c.h it away!"

"Giving you money for dress is wasting it," cried the old lady. "What is dress for? Pray why, do you imagine, have I provided you with three and four dozen expensive dresses a year and hats and lingerie and everything in proportion? Just to gratify your vanity? No, indeed! To enable you to get a husband, one able to provide for you as befits your station. And because I have been generous with you, because I have spared no expense in keeping you up to your station, in giving you opportunity, you turn on me and revile me!"

"You HAVE been generous, Grandmother," said Margaret, humbly. There had risen up before her a hundred extravagances in which the old lady had indulged her--things quite unnecessary for show, the intimate luxuries that contribute only indirectly to show by aiding in giving the feeling and air of refinement. It was of these luxuries that Margaret was especially fond; and her grandmother, with an instinct that those tastes of Margaret's proved her indeed a lady--and made it impossible that she should marry, or even think of marrying, "foolishly"--had been most graciously generous in gratifying them. Now, these luxuries were to be withdrawn, these pampered tastes were to be starved. Margaret collapsed despairingly upon her table. "I wish to marry, Heaven knows!

Only--only--" She raised herself; her lip quivered--"Good G.o.d, Grandmother, I CAN'T give myself to a man who repels me! You make me hate men--marriage--everything of that kind. Sometimes I long to hide in a convent!"

"You can indulge that longing after the end of this season," said her grandmother. "You'll certainly hardly dare show yourself in Was.h.i.+ngton, where you have become noted for your dress.... That's what exasperates me against you! No girl appreciates refinement and luxury more than you do. No woman has better taste, could use a large income to better advantage. And you have intelligence. You know you must have a competent husband. Yet you fritter away your opportunities. A very short time, and you'll be a worn, faded old maid, and the settled people who profess to be so fond of you will be laughing at you, and deriding you, and pitying you."

Deriding! Pitying!

"I've no patience with the women of that clique you're so fond of," the old lady went on. "If the ideas they profess--the shallow frauds that they are!--were to prevail, what would become of women of our station?

Women should hold themselves dear, should encourage men in that old-time reverence for the s.e.x and its right to be sheltered and wors.h.i.+ped and showered with luxury. As for you--a poor girl--countenancing such low and ruinous views--Is it strange I am disgusted with you? Have you no pride--no self-respect?"

Margaret sat motionless, gazing into vacancy. She could not but endorse every word her grandmother was saying. She had heard practically those same words often, but they had had no effect; now, toward the end of this her least successful season, with most of her acquaintances married off, and enjoying and flaunting the luxury she might have had--for, they had married men, of "the right sort"--"capable husbands"--men who had been more or less attentive to her--now, these grim and terrible axioms of worldly wisdom, of upper cla.s.s honor, from her grandmother sounded in her ears like the boom of surf on reefs in the ears of the sailor.

A long miserable silence; then, her grandmother: "What do you purpose to do, Margaret?"

"To hustle," said the girl with a short, bitter laugh. "I must rope in somebody. Oh, I've been realizing, these past two months. I'm awake at last."

Madam Bowker studied the girl's face, gave a sigh of relief. "I feel greatly eased," said she. "I see you are coming to your senses before it's too late. I knew you would. You have inherited too much of my nature, of my brain and my character."

Margaret faced the old woman in sudden anger. "If you had made allowances for that, if you had reasoned with me quietly, instead of nagging and bullying and trying to compel, all this might have been settled long ago." She shrugged her shoulders. "But that's past and done. I'm going to do my best. Only--I warn you, don't try to drive me!

I'll not be driven!"

"What do you think of Grant Arkwright?" asked her grandmother.

"I intend to marry him," replied Margaret.

The old lady's stern eyes gleamed delight.

"But," Margaret hastened to add, "you mustn't interfere. He doesn't like you. He's afraid of you. If you give the slightest sign, he'll sheer off. You must let me handle him."

"The insolent puppy," muttered Madam Bowker. "I've always detested him."

"You don't want me to marry him?"

"On the contrary," the old lady replied. "He would make the best possible husband for you." She smiled like a grand inquisitor at prospect of a pleasant day with rack and screw. "He needs a firm hand,"

said she.

Margaret burst out laughing at this implied compliment to herself; then she colored as with shame and turned away. "What frauds we women are!"

she exclaimed. "If I had any sense of decency left, I'd be ashamed to do it!"

"There you go again!" cried her grandmother. "You can't be practical five minutes in succession. Why should a woman be ashamed to do a man a service in spite of himself? Men are fools where women are concerned. I never knew one that was not. And the more sensible they are in other respects, the bigger fools they are about us! Left to themselves, they always make a mess of marriage. They think they know what they want, but they don't. We have to teach them. A man needs a firm hand during courts.h.i.+p, and a firmer hand after marriage. So many wives forget their duty and relax. If you don't take hold of that young Arkwright, he'll no doubt fall a victim to some unscrupulous hussy."

Unscrupulous hussy! Margaret looked at herself in the mirror, met her own eyes with a cynical laugh. "Well, I'm no worse than the others," she added, half to herself. Presently she said, "Grant is coming this afternoon. I look a fright. I must take a headache powder and get some sleep." Her grandmother rose instantly. "Yes, you do look badly--for you. And Arkwright has very keen eyes--thanks to those silly women of your set who teach men things they have no business to know." She advanced and kissed her granddaughter graciously on top of the head. "I am glad to see my confidence in you was not misplaced, Margaret," said she. "I could not believe I was so utterly mistaken in judgment of character. I'll go to your mother and take her for a drive."

CHAPTER IV

"HE ISN'T LIKE US"

Margaret continued to sit there, her elbows on the dressing-table, her knuckles pressing into her cheeks, the hazel eyes gazing at their reflection in the mirror. "What is it in me," she said to her image, "that makes me less successful at drawing men to the point than so many girls who are no better looking than I?" And she made an inventory of her charms that was creditably free from vanity. "And men certainly like to talk to me," she pursued. "The fish bite, but the hook doesn't hold.

Perhaps--probably--I'm not sentimental enough. I don't simper and pretend innocence and talk tommy rot--and listen to it as if I were eating honey."

This explanation was not altogether satisfactory, however. She felt that, if she had a certain physical something, which she must lack, nothing else would matter--nothing she said or did. It was baffling; for, there, before her eyes were precisely the charms of feature and figure that in other women, in far less degree, had set men, many men, quite beside themselves. Her lip curled, and her eyes laughed satirically as she thought of the follies of those men--how they had let women lead them up and down in public places, drooling and sighing and seeming to enjoy their own pitiful plight. If that expression of satire had not disappeared so quickly, she might have got at the secret of her "miserable failure." For, it was her habit of facing men with only lightly veiled amus.e.m.e.nt, or often frank ridicule, in her eyes, in the curve of her lips, that frightened them off, that gave them the uneasy sense that their a.s.sumptions of superiority to the female were being judged and derided.

But time was flying. It was after three; the headache was still pounding in her temples, and her eyes did look almost as haggard and her skin almost as sallow as her grandmother had said. She took an anti-pyrene powder from a box in her dressing-table, threw off all her clothes, swathed herself in a long robe of pale-blue silk. She locked the door into the hall, and went into her bedroom, closed the door between. She put the powder in water, drank it, dropped down upon a lounge at the foot of her bed and covered herself. The satin pillow against her cheek, the coolness and softness of the silk all along and around her body, were deliciously soothing. Her blood beat less fiercely, and somber thoughts drew slowly away into a vague cloud at the horizon of her mind.

Lying there, with senses soothed by luxury and deadened to pain by the drug, she felt so safe, so shut-in against all intrusion. In a few hours the struggle, the bitterness would begin again; but at least here was this interval of repose, of freedom. Only when she was thus alone did she ever get that most voluptuous of all sensations--freedom. Freedom and luxury! "I'm afraid I can't eat my cake and have it, too," she mused drowsily. "Well--whether or not I can have freedom, at least I MUST have luxury. I'm afraid Grant can't give me nearly all I want--who could?...

If I had the courage--Craig could make more than Grant has, if he were put to it. I'm sure he could. I'm sure he could do almost anything--but be attractive to a woman. No, Craig is too strong a dose--besides, there's the risk. Grant is safest. Better a small loaf than--than no Paris dresses."

Arkwright, entering Mrs. Severence's drawing-room with Craig at half-past five, found a dozen people there. Most of them were of that young married set which Margaret preferred, to the anger and disgust of her grandmother and against the entreaties of her own common sense. "The last place in the world to look for a husband," Madam Bowker had said again and again, to both her daughter and her granddaughter. "Their talk is all in ridicule of marriage, and of every sacred thing. And if there are any bachelors, they have come--well, certainly not in search of honorable wedlock."

The room was noisily gay; but Margaret, at the tea-table in a rather somber brown dress with a big brown hat, whose great plumes shadowed her pale, somewhat haggard face, was evidently not in one of her sparkling moods. The headache powder and the nap had not been successful. She greeted Arkwright with a slight, absent smile, seemed hardly to note Craig, as Arkwright presented him.

"Sit down here beside Miss Severence," Grant said.

"Yes, do," acquiesced Margaret; and Joshua thought her cold and haughty, an aristocrat of the unapproachable type, never natural and never permitting others to be natural.

"And tell her all about yourself," continued Grant.

"My friend Josh, here," he explained to Margaret, "is one of those serious, absorbed men who concentrate entirely upon themselves. It isn't egotism; it's genius."