table, the whole chain of tyrannical trifles binding
one hour to the next, and each member of the household
to all the others, made any less systematised and
affluent existence seem unreal and precarious.
But now it was the Welland house, and the life he
was expected to lead in it, that had become unreal
and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore,
when he had stood irresolute, halfway down the bank,
was as close to him as the blood in his veins.
All night he lay awake in the big chintz bedroom at
May’s side, watching the moonlight slant along
the carpet, and thinking of Ellen Olenska driving
home across the gleaming beaches behind Beaufort’s
trotters.
A party for the Blenkers—the Blenkers?”
Mr. Welland laid down his knife and fork and looked
anxiously and incredulously across the luncheon-table
at his wife, who, adjusting her gold eye-glasses,
read aloud, in the tone of high comedy: “Professor
and Mrs. Emerson Sillerton request the pleasure of
Mr. and Mrs. Welland’s company at the meeting
of the Wednesday Afternoon Club on August 25th at
3 o’clock punctually. To meet Mrs. and
the Misses Blenker. “Red Gables, Catherine
Street. R. S. V. P.”
“Good gracious—” Mr. Welland
gasped, as if a second reading had been necessary
to bring the monstrous absurdity of the thing home
to him.
“Poor Amy Sillerton—you never can
tell what her husband will do next,” Mrs. Welland
sighed. “I suppose he’s just discovered
the Blenkers.”
Professor Emerson Sillerton was a thorn in the side
of Newport society; and a thorn that could not be
plucked out, for it grew on a venerable and venerated
family tree. He was, as people said, a man who
had had “every advantage.” His father
was Sillerton Jackson’s uncle, his mother a
Pennilow of Boston; on each side there was wealth
and position, and mutual suitability. Nothing—as
Mrs. Welland had often remarked— nothing
on earth obliged Emerson Sillerton to be an archaeologist,
or indeed a Professor of any sort, or to live in Newport
in winter, or do any of the other revolutionary things
that he did. But at least, if he was going to
break with tradition and flout society in the face,
he need not have married poor Amy Dagonet, who had
a right to expect “something different,”
and money enough to keep her own carriage.
No one in the Mingott set could understand why Amy
Sillerton had submitted so tamely to the eccentricities
of a husband who filled the house with long-haired
men and short-haired women, and, when he travelled,
took her to explore tombs in Yucatan instead of going
to Paris or Italy. But there they were, set in
their ways, and apparently unaware that they were
different from other people; and when they gave one
of their dreary annual garden-parties every family
on the Cliffs, because of the Sillerton-Pennilow-Dagonet
connection, had to draw lots and send an unwilling
representative.
