Julia’s new French slippers pinched, and her tiara pressed on certain nerves of her head, as the more humble hat pin has been known to do. The procession up the staircase seemed endless. To Julia it looked like a river of jewels; she had ceased to know or care who were the mere women beneath it. Not all of the men were foils. Royalty, the entire cabinet, and the diplomatic corps were present; gorgeous uniforms, sashes, and orders saved many men from being mistaken for waiters.
As the first guests were ascending, Julia had turned to the duke and said sweetly:?—
“I have asked Ishbel and Bridgit, and they have promised to come.”
“You have what?” asked the duke, his dull eyes glowing.
“They were my first friends in England, and as I am your hostess, it occurred to me that I had the right to issue a few invitations on my own account. I merely mention it, that you may not be betrayed by surprise when you see them.”
“You have taken a purely feminine advantage—waiting until this moment to tell me—when I can do nothing!” It was long since the duke had felt himself on fire with passion.
“Of course we all take our advantages where we can, and are as deceitful as possible,” said Julia, smiling into his snapping eyes. “Those are primal weapons, and you gave them to us. Here come some terribly important people.”
The duke had been forced to swallow his wrath, and, in a few moments, forgot it in the sudden stream of arrivals. After a time fatigue overcame him and he slipped away, leaving Julia alone with Lady Arabella (yellow and bony in white embossed velvet and rubies). France was making himself agreeable to the dowagers. The interview with his wife had inspired him with a longing to go out and entice some wretch of the streets to a hiding-place, where he could beat her to a jelly, but the gall in his blood did not affect his shrewd cunning brain, which steadily pursued its object. To-night was his first opportunity to be gallant to women, politics and sport having claimed him since his illness; and after a few well-turned compliments, he talked of nothing but the beauty and virtues of his wife. Perhaps the duke was the only human being who really liked him, for, without magnetism or charm of any sort, he left both men and women cold where he did not repel; but to-night he acquitted himself so creditably that several mothers thought upon their loss with regret.
Julia’s mind was beginning to play her strange tricks. Carlyle’s “French Revolution” had been among the books at Bosquith, and its style had so fascinated her that she had read it twice. It so happened that a number of extremely handsome women with white hair honored the Kingsborough ball to-night. Some were young. All were gorgeously bedecked. The intense hard glitter of diamonds dissolved into mist, took on fantastic shapes: graceful powdered heads, glittering with jewels, on the top of pikes, warm pampered bodies blocking the stairs.
It was not so much that Julia’s mind was awakening to the problem of the poor, the menace of the unemployed and the underpaid; in truth, she generally shuddered and turned away when Bridgit and Ishbel discussed the subject; but these spectacular women on the grand staircase of Kingsborough House seemed so ripe! They looked so useless, so languidly magnificent, so overbred, so close to the apotheosis of their destiny, that—again her fancy veered—Julia half expected to see a row of footlights behind them; then a sudden shifting of scenery, and the tumbrel and guillotine. The time came when Julia knew many of them well enough to deal out a greater measure of justice than the outsider that hurls the word “parasite” at every woman fortunate enough to possess what the poor all want—wealth. She learned that many of them worked harder for their political husbands than an army of secretaries, that others rose, during the season, at an hour when they fain would have slept off the fatigue of the day before, in order to get through a mass of correspondence relating to the particular problem, political, social, or economic, they were striving to solve. Many of these women were mothers to their tenantry, watching over the growth and education of every girl and boy born on their estates. Others went daily to settlements, some to districts so abandoned as to be practically hopeless, and requiring a mettle far higher than the mere soldier needs when racing his fellows to battle. Some worked with churches, others with societies, others alone; nearly all were interested in one charity or another, many trying to feel their way through the obvious method of relief to some cause they could grapple with, since the power to legislate was forbidden them. Scarcely one of those women, dressed from Paris, weighted down with jewels old and new, but faced the serious side of life at some hour during the twenty-four; but although Julia came to know this, the impression of the terrible immaturity of civilization, caused by the blind vanity and selfishness of human nature at the outset, and persisted in through the centuries in spite of lessons written in blood, and of the gross unfairness of life, never left her. If she was in the toils of youth at present, and far more interested in herself than in the world and its problems, the mere fact that these blue marsh lights could dance across her mind occasionally, would have satisfied her more advanced friends that when the awakening came it would be sudden and final.
But not to-night. Her visions fled. She looked down into a pair of dark satiric eyes, and her own flashed back a more than courteous welcome. Ishbel had come some time since, and after piloting the delighted Mr. Jones up and down for half an hour (wearing his diamonds and looking the radiant wife), had deposited............