“Ah, but if that’s part of the price?”
They went along fallen from the gay spirit of their
talk into a silence which he broke with a sigh.
“Can that poor wretch and the radiant girl we
left yonder really belong to the same system of things?
How impossible each makes the other seem!”
Mrs. Horn believed in the world and in society and
its unwritten constitution devoutly, and she tolerated
her niece’s benevolent activities as she tolerated
her aesthetic sympathies because these things, however
oddly, were tolerated—even encouraged—by
society; and they gave Margaret a charm. They
made her originality interesting. Mrs. Horn did
not intend that they should ever go so far as to make
her troublesome; and it was with a sense of this abeyant
authority of her aunt’s that the girl asked
her approval of her proposed call upon the Dryfooses.
She explained as well as she could the social destitution
of these opulent people, and she had of course to
name Beaton as the source of her knowledge concerning
them.
“Did Mr. Beaton suggest your calling on them?”
“No; he rather discouraged it.”
“And why do you think you ought to go in this
particular instance? New York is full of people
who don’t know anybody.”
Margaret laughed. “I suppose it’s
like any other charity: you reach the cases you
know of. The others you say you can’t help,
and you try to ignore them.”
“It’s very romantic,” said Mrs.
Horn. “I hope you’ve counted the cost;
all the possible consequences.”
Margaret knew that her aunt had in mind their common
experience with the Leightons, whom, to give their
common conscience peace, she had called upon with
her aunt’s cards and excuses, and an invitation
for her Thursdays, somewhat too late to make the visit
seem a welcome to New York. She was so coldly
received, not so much for herself as in her quality
of envoy, that her aunt experienced all the comfort
which vicarious penance brings. She did not perhaps
consider sufficiently her niece’s guiltlessness
in the expiation. Margaret was not with her at
St. Barnaby in the fatal fortnight she passed there,
and never saw the Leightons till she went to call
upon them. She never complained: the strain
of asceticism, which mysteriously exists in us all,
and makes us put peas, boiled or unboiled, in our
shoes, gave her patience with the snub which the Leightons
presented her for her aunt. But now she said,
with this in mind: “Nothing seems simpler
than to get rid of people if you don’t want
them. You merely have to let them alone.”
“It isn’t so pleasant, letting them alone,”
said Mrs. Horn.
“Or having them let you alone,” said Margaret;
for neither Mrs. Leighton nor Alma had ever come to
enjoy the belated hospitality of Mrs. Horn’s
Thursdays.
“Yes, or having them let you alone,” Mrs.
Horn courageously consented. “And all that
I ask you, Margaret, is to be sure that you really
want to know these people.”
