After this interview Keith experienced a marked and formal coldness from nearly all of his old associates, Those with whom he came into direct personal contact showed him scrupulous politeness, but confined their conversation to the briefest necessary words, and quit him as soon as possible. He found himself very much alone, for at this period he had lost the confidence of one faction and had not yet gained that of the other.
His investigations encountered always increasing difficulties. In his own department he could obtain little assistance. A dead inertia opposed all his efforts. Nevertheless, he went ahead doggedly, using Krafft and some of Krafft's protégés to considerable effect.
But soon pressure was brought on him from a new direction: his opponents struck at him through his home.
For some days Nan had been aware of a changed atmosphere in the society she frequented and had heretofore led. The change was subtle, defied analysis, but was to the woman's sensitive instincts indubitable. At first she had been inclined to consider it subjective, to imagine that something wrong with herself must be projecting itself through her imagination; but finally she realized that the impression was well based. In people's attitude there was nothing overt; it was rather a withdrawl of intimacy, a puzzling touch of formality. She seemed overnight to have lost in popularity.
Truth to tell, she paid little attention to this. By now she was experienced enough in human nature to understand and to be able to gauge the slight fluctuations, the ebbs and flows of esteem, the kaleidoscopic shiftings and realignments of the elements of frivolous and formal society. Mrs. Brown had hired away Mrs. Smith's best servant; for an hour they looked askance on Mrs. Brown; then, the episode forgotten, Mrs. Brown's cork bobbed to the surface company of all the other corks. It was very trivial. Besides, just at this moment, Nan was wholly occupied with preparations for her first "afternoon" of the year. She intended as usual to give three of these formal affairs, and from them the season took its tone. The list was necessarily far from exclusive, but Nan made up for that by the care she gave her most original arrangements. She prided herself on doing things simply, but with a difference, calling heavily on her resources of correspondence, her memory, and her very good imagination for some novelty of food or entertainment. At the first of these receptions, too, she wore always for the first time some new and marvellous toilet straight from Paris, the style of which had not been shown to even her most intimate friends. This year, for example, she had done the most obvious and, therefore, the most unlikely thing: she had turned to the contemporaneous Spanish for her theme. Nobody had thought of that. The Colonial, the Moorish, the German, the Russian, the Hungarian--all the rest of the individual or "picturesque"--but nobody had thought to look next door. Nan had decorated the rooms with yellow and red, hung the walls with riatas, strings of red peppers and the like, obtained Spanish guitar players, and added enough fiery Mexican dishes to the more digestible refreshments to emphasize the Spanish flavour. She wore a dress of golden satin, a wreath of coral flowers about her hair, and morocco slippers matched in hue.