“Well, I guess this is all right,” he
said, and she answered briefly: “Don’t
forget you’re to take down Madame de Follerive;
and for goodness’ sake don’t call her
‘Countess.’”
“Why, she is one, ain’t she?” he
returned good-humouredly.
“I wish you’d put that newspaper away,”
she continued; his habit of leaving old newspapers
about the drawing-room annoyed her.
“Oh, that reminds me—” instead
of obeying her he unfolded the paper. “I
brought it in to show you something. Jim Driscoll’s
been appointed Ambassador to England.”
“Jim Driscoll—!” She caught up
the paper and stared at the paragraph he pointed to.
Jim Driscoll—that pitiful nonentity, with
his stout mistrustful commonplace wife! It seemed
extraordinary that the government should have hunted
up such insignificant people. And immediately
she had a great vague vision of the splendours they
were going to—all the banquets and ceremonies
and precedences....
“I shouldn’t say she’d want to,
with so few jewels—” She dropped the
paper and turned to her husband. “If you
had a spark of ambition, that’s the kind of
thing you’d try for. You could have got
it just as easily as not!”
He laughed and thrust his thumbs in his waistcoat
armholes with the gesture she disliked. “As
it happens, it’s about the one thing I couldn’t.”
“You couldn’t? Why not?”
“Because you’re divorced. They won’t
have divorced Ambassadresses.”
“They won’t? Why not, I’d like
to know?”
“Well, I guess the court ladies are afraid there’d
be too many pretty women in the Embassies,”
he answered jocularly.
She burst into an angry laugh, and the blood flamed
up into her face. “I never heard of anything
so insulting!” she cried, as if the rule had
been invented to humiliate her.
There was a noise of motors backing and advancing
in the court, and she heard the first voices on the
stairs. She turned to give herself a last look
in the glass, saw the blaze of her rubies, the glitter
of her hair, and remembered the brilliant names on
her list.
But under all the dazzle a tiny black cloud remained.
She had learned that there was something she could
never get, something that neither beauty nor influence
nor millions could ever buy for her. She could
never be an Ambassador’s wife; and as she advanced
to welcome her first guests she said to herself that
it was the one part she was really made for.
