Part 26 (1/2)
”So you are a heretic, too? And then they are so smug.”
”But there's consistency and consistency,” Bobby argued. ”There's mashed potato and frappe, for instance, equally hard, equally h.o.m.ogeneous, yet totally different. To my mind, there is a distinct choice between them, and I prefer--”
”Cherries in your frappe.” Sally capped his sentence for him. ”In other words, we all like a consistent person with lumps of inconsistency.
That's myself, and one of my lumps is a dislike of having Mrs. Lloyd Avalons on our tenement committee.”
”But, if you are slumming--”
”That is ign.o.ble of you, Beatrix. The committee doesn't slum within its own confines.”
”Oh, I didn't mean that at all,” Beatrix protested hastily. ”Really, though. I can't see why you and Mrs. Lloyd Avalons can't unite in working for somebody quite outside either of your worlds.”
Sally raised her brows in saucy imitation of Mrs. Lloyd Avalons's pet expression. Then she pushed Beatrix's words aside with daintily outstretched fingers.
”Can't you?” she said coolly, as she ended her little pantomime. ”Well, I can. To adopt Bobby's choice ill.u.s.tration, it would be like mixing potato and frappe. The potato would melt the frappe, and then the frappe would--well, would render the potato unpalatable. In other words, if we work together, I shall pulverize Mrs. Lloyd Avalons, and then the dust of her individuality will get in among my nerves and clog them.”
”If you can't be consistent, Miss Van Osdel, please do try to be concrete,” Thayer urged. ”I confess that I find it a little difficult to follow you.”
”Not at all,” Bobby interposed. ”She isn't going anywhere. Sally's mental processes always remind me of the way we used to play cars in a row of easy chairs. We were extremely energetic, and we pretended that we were going somewhere; but in reality we didn't budge an inch. Sally, what is the reason you don't like Mrs. Lloyd Avalons?”
”Because she is utterly preposterous,” Sally replied concisely.
”And yet, she is bound to arrive, some day,” Lorimer said thoughtfully.
”Then I hope it may not be until after I have left,” Sally retorted. ”I don't care to have her making connections with me.”
”Sally, you are uncharitable,” Beatrix said rebukingly; but Bobby interrupted,--
”That's more than you can say of Mrs. Lloyd Avalons. She is on half the charity committees in town.”
”How did she get there?” Thayer asked, with unfeigned curiosity.
”By toiling upward, day and night. That's where she scores ahead of the great men. According to the poet, they only belonged to the night s.h.i.+ft. Mrs. Lloyd Avalons sleeps with the Blue Book under her pillow and dreams social combinations.”
”She probably has a chess board always at her elbow,” Sally suggested.
”I can fancy the game, the white queen and her p.a.w.n against the whole black force, each man neatly tagged with his name and social status.”
”She is marching straight into the king-row, though,” Bobby added.
Beatrix called them to order.
”Does it strike you that this is perilously near to being gossip?” she inquired.
But Sally had the last word.
”It's not gossip to talk over the possibilities of the lower cla.s.ses,”
she remarked imperturbably. ”It is social science.”
Lorimer went back to the original question which had started the discussion.
”As I said before, there is a certain inconsistency in the idea of a given number of women setting themselves to work to better the condition of the ma.s.ses, and then coming to wreck and ruin because one of their number is of a slightly different set.”