Part 2 (2/2)

”Now,” said Mrs. Ess Kay, when we were settled in our places, ”I know a good many people on the s.h.i.+p, but most of them are n.o.bodies, and I do _not_ intend to be troubled with them, nor do I think that the d.u.c.h.ess would care to have me let Betty mix herself up with anybody and everybody. I shall do a great deal of weeding and select her acquaintances carefully.”

”Betty,” indeed! I'd never told her that she might call me Betty; and I hate having persons I don't care for take hold of my name, without using a handle to touch it. It makes me feel as I did when I was a child, and Mother commanded me to let myself be kissed by unkissable and extraneous grown-ups.

Thank goodness, Vic and I have come into the world with something of poor Father's sense of humour. My share often serves me as well as balm on a wound, or as a nice, dry, crackly little biscuit which you're enchanted to find when you're hungry, and thought you had nothing to eat; and I got a good deal of quiet comfort out of it during Mrs. Ess Kay's ”weeding” process, which otherwise would have done nothing but make me squirm.

When we had been on deck for a short time, a number of people came up to speak to Mrs. Ess Kay, and some to Miss Woodburn. The water was as smooth as the floor of a ballroom when it's been well waxed for a dance, and there was no excuse for the most sensitive person to be ill; consequently the deck was something like a kaleidoscope, with all its moving groups of men and women, girls and children. Most of the best-looking and best-dressed ones were Americans, and a great many seemed to know each other. Some of them laughed a good deal, and talked in high voices, putting emphasis on prepositions, which Miss Mackinstry and the others would never let me do in writing compositions. Somehow, though, when these people spoke it sounded very nice and cordial, more so than it does when English people greet each other, though the voices weren't so sweet--except a few that drawled in a pretty, Southern way, like Sally Woodburn's.

I could tell which were the poor things that Mrs. Ess Kay wanted to weed out of her acquaintance-garden for next season, by the way she acted when they came to say ”How do you do?” to her. She screwed up her eyes till they looked hard and sharp enough to go through you like a thin knife--(or more like a long, slender hatpin jabbing your head), and having waited an instant before returning their greeting, slowly answered; ”Very well, thank you. Yes, I _am_ going home rather early.

I'm due at Newport as soon as possible”; then fingered her open book (which she hadn't peeped into before) and made a little, just noticeable gesture with her lorgnette.

Then the poor people were too much crushed to stop and try to talk to Miss Woodburn, though she always looked at them sweetly, as if she would make up for her cousin being a dragon if she could.

By and by, somebody else would sail up, perhaps not half as nice to look at as the one who had gone. But lo, Mrs. Stuyvesant-Knox would be suddenly transformed. She would smile, and hold out her hand. To their ”How do you do?” she would respond ”How do you do?” and though I don't think she's really much interested in anyone but herself, she would ask where they had been, what they had been doing, and how it happened they were going back so soon. The next thing, she would say to me: ”Betty, dear, I should like you and Mrs. or Mr. So-and-So to know each other, as I hope you'll meet again, while you're staying with me. Lady Betty Bulkeley, etc., etc. I wonder if you have ever met her brother, the Duke of Stanforth, and her cousin, the Marquis of Loveland, over in London?”

Loveland would have had a fit if he could have heard her, for, of course, at home only the lower middle cla.s.ses and such people hurl a Marquis's t.i.tle at his head in that fas.h.i.+on; but I suppose foreigners, unless they've been in England a long time, don't know the difference.

When I got a chance, I asked Sally Woodburn how Mrs. Stuyvesant-Knox made her distinctions in snubbing some people and preening herself to others.

”My deah,” said Sally (I'm to call her ”Sally” now; it's been understood between us for some time), ”my deah, you're a poor, innocent child, and I reckon you've been brought up in darkness, without even so much as hearing of the Four Hundred.”

”What are the Four Hundred? Are they a kind of Light Brigade, like the Six Hundred?” I asked. ”Or is it a sort of governing body like--like the Council of Three?”

She laughed so much at this, with her charming, velvety laugh, that I grew quite nervous, for it's embarra.s.sing to have said something funny when you've meant to be rather intelligent. But soon she took pity on me. ”You perfect love,” she said; ”that's really too sweet. It deserves to be put into _Life_, or something. And yet you're not so far wrong, when one comes to think of it. The Four Hundred _is_ a kind of governing body; only I believe it's really reduced to Two Hundred now.

They govern New York; and Newport; and Lennox; and Bar Harbour; and several other places which are considered very nice and important.”

”Oh! Are they Republicans or Democrats?” I enquired, sure that I really was being intelligent at last, for I'd heard Stan say that, in America, the Republican party was rather like our Conservatives, and the Democrats like the Liberals; and I'd remembered because I believe I should be very much interested in politics if only I understood more about them. But Sally seemed to think that question funny, too.

”They can be either, my poor lamb,” she exclaimed; ”and they can be almost anything else they like, if only they're just awfully, dreadfully rich, and can manage to sc.r.a.pe up a family crest. It used to be the crest that counted, with the man who invented the Four Hundred; but since his day, that idea has got buried under heaps and heaps of gold, and pearls and diamonds; especially pearls. In those places I was telling you about, you don't exist unless you're in the Four Hundred, which is now being sifted down to Two Hundred, and will probably be Seventy-five in a year or two. You may have the bluest blood in America in your veins; you may be simply _smeared_ with ancestors, but if you haven't managed to push forward in a clever, indescribable way, neither they nor you will ever be noticed, and your grey hairs will go down to the grave in the Wrong Set. _Now_ do you understand why my cousin Katherine makes narrow eyes for some people, and broad smiles for others?”

”Ye-es, I suppose I do,” I answered. ”Only--we are quite different at home. I haven't been about at all yet, but I know; because some things are in the air. How did Mrs. Stuyvesant-Knox ever have the poor Wrong Setters for acquaintances, though?”

”Because (she'd kill me if she heard this) she has only lately got into the Right Set herself, and after trouble enough to give an ordinary woman nervous prostration. That kind of thing _does_ give it to a lot of women--especially if they fail. But Cousin Katherine very seldom fails. She almost always carries things through. If you knew anything about America in general, and New York in particular, you'd be able to realise what a hard time she's had, when I tell you that till her husband died she lived west of Chicago. To get into the Four Hundred if you've lived west of Chicago, (unless you're Californian, which is getting to be fas.h.i.+onable), is just like having to climb over one of those great, high walls of yours in England, bristling with nails or broken gla.s.s.”

”My goodness!” I exclaimed. ”How funny! Fancy if people who live in Surrey should glare at people who live in Devons.h.i.+re.”

”That's different. You see, Chicago is _new_.”

”But so is all America, isn't it?” I asked, stupidly. ”What difference can a hundred or so years make?”

”We haven't begun to think in centuries yet, on our side of the water, my deah.” (She has the most delicious way of saying ”my deah,” and all her ”r's” are soft like that; only it's too much trouble to write them for n.o.body but myself to see.) ”Anyhow, it _is_ so, between New York and Chicago people--that is, the people who count in Society with a big S: and it was a great triumph for my cousin to become the Three-Hundred-and-Ninety-Ninth in the Four Hundred. She did it by buying a Russian Prince.”

”_Buying_ a----”

”Yes, love, he was going to the highest bidder, and she bought him.

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