“If we are going to discuss this question, Mr. Bates, I must speak frankly. Our hostesses are polite to their guests.”
The other began suddenly to laugh. “Even when the guests steal?”
“Jewels!” exclaimed the other. “Bright, particular, conspicuous jewels—crown-jewels, precious beyond replacing! Think, Miss Castleman, you trust a guest, you admit him to your castle—and suddenly you find that the great ruby of your diadem is gone!”
“Is it that Mrs. Winthrop hopes to marry van Tuiver to her daughter?” asked Sylvia, crossly.
“Oh, no,” said Bates. “He is to marry Dorothy Cortlandt—that was arranged when they were babies, and Mrs. Winthrop wouldn’t dream of cutting in on it.”
“My dear Miss Castleman,” said the other, “you’ve robbed Mrs. Winthrop herself.”
“Please don’t _mis_understand,” said Bates. “It’s all perfectly proper and noble, you know—and all that. I’ve nothing to say against Mrs. Winthrop—she’s a charming woman, and has a right to be admired by everybody. But being a queen, you see, she has to have a court, with a lot of distinguished courtiers. She reads poetry to them, and they write it to her, and they sit at her feet and dream wonderful dreams, and she gazes at them. I know a dozen fellows who’ve been that way all through college; and I suppose it does them good—they tell me I haven’t any soul and can’t understand these things. What I’ve always said is, ‘Maybe you’re right, and maybe I’m a brute, but it looks to me like the same old game.’”
“The same old game,” repeated Sylvia, wonderingly. She found herself thinking suddenly of one of the maxims of Lady Dee—one which she had been too young to understand, but had been made to learn nevertheless: “The young girl’s deadliest enemy is the married flirt!” Could it be that Mrs. Winthrop was anything so desperate as that?
“Mr. van Tuiver is one of these poets?” she asked, finally.
“I don’t think van Tuiver goes in for poetry; but he’s strong on manners and things like that, and he says that Mrs. Winthrop is the only hostess in America who has the old-world charm. Of course that ravished her, and they’ve been great chums.”
“And I came and spoiled it all!” exclaimed the girl.
“You came and spoiled it all!” said Bates.
Sylvia sat for a while in thought. “You know, Mr. Bates,” she remarked, “it rather puzzles me that people consider Mr. van Tuiver as having distinguished manners. I really haven’t been impressed that way.”