On a hot morning in the early summer Mr. Germen found two or three—two of them of larger size and seeming to contain business papers. These he placed where they would be seen at once. Mr. Vanderpoel was a little later than usual in his arrival. At this season he came from his place in the country, and before leaving it this morning he had been talking to his wife, whom he found rather disturbed by a chance encounter with a young woman who had returned to visit her mother after a year spent in England with her English husband. This young woman, now Lady Bowen, once Milly Jones, had been one of the amusing marvels5 of New York. A girl neither rich nor so endowed by nature as to be able to press upon the world any special claim to consideration as a beauty, her enterprise, and the daring of her tactics, had been the delight of many a satiric6 onlooker7. In her schooldays she had ingenuously8 mapped out her future career. Other American girls married men with titles, and she intended to do the same thing. The other little girls laughed, but they liked to hear her talk. All information regarding such unions as was to be found in the newspapers and magazines, she collected and studiously read—sometimes aloud to her companions.
Social paragraphs about royalties9, dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, court balls and glittering functions, she devoured10 and learned by heart. An abominably11 vulgar little person, she was an interestingly pertinacious12 creature, and wrought13 night and day at acquiring an air of fashionable elegance14, at first naturally laying it on in such manner as suggested that it should be scraped off with a knife, but with experience gaining a certain specious15 knowledge of forms. How the over-mature child at school had assimilated her uncanny young worldliness, it would have been less difficult to decide, if possible sources had been less numerous. The air was full of it, the literature of the day, the chatter16 of afternoon teas, the gossip of the hour. Before she was fifteen she saw the indiscretion of her childish frankness, and realised that it might easily be detrimental18 to her ambitions. She said no more of her plans for her future, and even took the astute19 tone of carelessly treating as a joke her vulgar little past. But no titled foreigner appeared upon the horizon without setting her small, but business-like, brain at work. Her lack of wealth and assured position made her situation rather hopeless. She was not of the class of lucky young women whose parents' gorgeous establishments offered attractions to wandering persons of rank. She and her mother lived in a flat, and gave rather pathetic afternoon teas in return for such more brilliant hospitalities as careful and pertinacious calling and recalling obliged their acquaintances to feel they could not decently be left wholly out of. Milly and her anxious mother had worked hard. They lost no opportunity of writing a note, or sending a Christmas card, or an economical funeral wreath. By daily toil20 and the amicable21 ignoring of casualness of manner or slights, they managed to cling to the edge of the precipice22 of social oblivion, into whose depths a lesser23 degree of assiduity, or a greater sensitiveness, would have plunged24 them. Once—early in Milly's career, when her ever-ready chatter and her superficial brightness were a novelty, it had seemed for a short time that luck might be glancing towards her. A young man of foreign title and of Bohemian tastes met her at a studio dance, and, misled by the smartness of her dress and her always carefully carried air of careless prosperity, began to pay a delusive25 court to her. For a few weeks all her freshest frocks were worn assiduously and credit was strained to buy new ones. The flat was adorned26 with fresh flowers and several new yellow and pale blue cushions appeared at the little teas, which began to assume a more festive27 air. Desirable people, who went ordinarily to the teas at long intervals28 and through reluctant weakness, or sometimes rebellious29 amiability30, were drummed up and brought firmly to the fore1. Milly herself began to look pink and fluffy31 through mere32 hopeful good spirits. Her thin little laugh was heard incessantly33, and people amusedly if they were good-tempered, derisively34 if they were spiteful, wondered if it really would come to something. But it did not. The young foreigner suddenly left New York, making his adieus with entire lightness. There was the end of it. He had heard something about lack of income and uncertainty35 of credit, which had suggested to him that discretion17 was the better part of valour. He married later a young lady in the West, whose father was a solid person.
Less astute young women, under the circumstances, would have allowed themselves a week or so of headache or influenza36, but Milly did not. She made calls in the new frocks, and with such persistent37 spirit that she fished forth38 from the depths of indifferent hospitality two or three excellent invitations. She wore her freshest pink frock, and an amazingly clever little Parisian diamond crescent in her hair, at the huge Monson ball at Delmonico's, and it was recorded that it was on that glittering occasion that her “Uncle James” was first brought upon the scene. He was only mentioned lightly at first. It was to Milly's credit that he was not made too much of. He was casually39 touched upon as a very rich uncle, who lived in Dakota, and had actually lived there since his youth, letting his few relations know nothing of him. He had been rather a black sheep as a boy, but Milly's mother had liked him, and, when he had run away from New York, he had told her what he was going to do, and had kissed her when she cried, and had taken her daguerreotype40 with him. Now he had written, and it turned out that he was enormously rich, and was interested in Milly. From that time Uncle James formed an atmosphere. He did not appear in New York, but Milly spent the next season in London, and the Monsons, being at Hurlingham one day, had her pointed41 out to them as a new American girl, who was the idol42 of a millionaire uncle. She was not living in an ultra fashionable quarter, or with ultra fashionable people, but she was, on all occasions, they heard, beautifully dressed and beautifully—if a little heavily—hung with gauds and gems43, her rings being said to be quite amazing and suggesting an impassioned lavishness44 on the part of Uncle James. London, having become inured45 to American marvels—Milly's bit of it—accepted and enjoyed Uncle James and all the sumptuous46 attributes of his Dakota.
English people would swallow anything sometimes, Mrs. Monson commented sagely47, and yet sometimes they stared and evidently thought you were lying about the simplest things. Milly's corner of South Kensington had gulped48 down the Dakota uncle. Her managing in this way, if there was no uncle, was too clever and amusing. She had left her mother at home to scrimp and save, and by hook or by crook49 she had contrived50 to get a number of quite good things to wear. She wore them with such an air of accustomed resource that the jewels might easily—mixed with some relics51 of her mother's better days—be of the order of the clever little Parisian diamond crescent. It was Milly's never-laid-aside manner which did it. The announcement of her union with Sir Arthur Bowen was received in certain New York circles with little suppressed shrieks52 of glee. It had been so sharp of her to aim low and to realise so quickly that she could not aim high. The baronetcy was a recent one, and not unconnected with trade. Sir Arthur was not a rich man, and, had it leaked out, believed in Uncle James. If he did not find him all his fancy painted, Milly was clever enough to keep him quiet. She was, when all was said and done, one of the American women of title, her servants and the tradespeople addressed her as “my lady,” and with her capacity for appropriating what was most useful, and her easy assumption of possessing all required, she was a very smart person indeed. She provided herself with an English accent, an English vocabulary, and an English manner, and in certain circles was felt to be most impressive.
At an afternoon function in the country Mrs. Vanderpoel had met Lady Bowen. She had been one of the few kindly53 ones, who in the past had given an occasional treat to Milly Jones for her girlhood's sake. Lady Bowen, having gathered a small group of hearers, was talking volubly to it, when the nice woman entered, and, catching54 sight of her, she swept across the room. It would not have been like Milly to fail to see and greet at once the wife of Reuben Vanderpoel. She would count anywhere, even in London sets it was not easy to connect one's self with. She had already discovered that there were almost as many difficulties to be surmounted55 in London by the wife of an unimportant baronet as there had been to be overcome in New York by a girl without money or place. It was well to have something in the way of information to offer in one's small talk with the lucky ones and Milly knew what subject lay nearest to Mrs. Vanderpoel's heart.
“Miss Vanderpoel has evidently been enjoying her visit to Stornham Court,” she said, after her first few sentences. “I met Mrs. Worthington at the Embassy, and she said she had buried herself in the country. But I think she must have run up to town quietly for shopping. I saw her one day in Piccadilly, and I was almost sure Lady Anstruthers was with her in the carriage—almost sure.”
Mrs. Vanderpoel's heart quickened its beat.
“You were so young when she married,” she said. “I daresay you have forgotten her face.”
“Oh, no!” Milly protested effusively56. “I remember her quite well. She was so pretty and pink and happy-looking, and her hair curled naturally. I used to pray every night that when I grew up I might have hair and a complexion57 like hers.”
Mrs. Vanderpoel's kind, maternal58 face fell.
“And you were not sure you recognised her? Well, I suppose twelve years does make a difference,” her voice dragging a little.
Milly saw that she had made a blunder. The fact was she had not even guessed at Rosy59's identity until long after the carriage had passed her.
“Oh, you see,” she hesitated, “their carriage was not near me, and I was not expecting to see them. And perhaps she looked a little delicate. I heard she had been rather delicate.”
She felt she was floundering, and bravely floundered away from the subject. She plunged into talk of Betty and people's anxiety to see her, and the fact that the society columns were already faintly
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