She tottered to the mantelpiece and burst into tears--the first tears she had shed in twenty worldly and scheming years--and the only tears that did attend the rupture of the Pastor-Ladd engagement.
There was the usual chatter, the usual slanders, the usual innuendoes that follow such an event. Charming little assassins, in Paquin gowns and picture hats flew about sticking pins into Phyllis’ reputation. Those worse gossips, the clubs, were not behindhand either; and old gentlemen, who ought to have known better, unctuously laid their heads together and passed the lies along. It is so much the custom to dwell on the good side of human nature that we are apt to forget the existence of another--that cruel malignancy, which, in embryo, may be seen any time at the monkey-house in the Zoo. In its more developed human form it jostles at our elbows every day.
The American duke himself behaved with a beautiful propriety. Publicly he took all the blame on his own shoulders, and hied him to the western wilds to scourge the campers and cigarette-smokers who infested his beloved forests. Thus congenially employed, he was quite willing to wait for Time’s healing hand to do the rest. In a year he was completely reënameled, and took a finer polish than ever.
Mr. Ladd hoped that Phyllis would return to Carthage to hide her head from the storm. But she insisted on staying in Washington, and "seeing it through," which she did with the prettiest defiance imaginable, returning pin for pin with gay insouciance, and dancing the night out in all manner of lions’ dens. In her veins there ran the blood of that old aristocratic South--of those fighting-cock Frenchmen, dark, lithe and graceful, who had loved, gambled and gone the pace with headlong recklessness and folly; of those fiery Spaniards, more grave and still more dissolute, to whom pride was the very breath of life, and who could call out a man and shoot him with the stateliest of courtesy.--What a race it had been in the heyday of its wildness and youth, the torment of women, the terror of men, alluring even now through the haze of by-gone pistol-smoke! And though it has been dead and gone these hundred and fifty years, the strain yet persists in some Phyllis here, some stripling there, attenuated perhaps, but far, far from lost.