"I am grateful for your decision. Permit me to see you to your carriage,
Miss Madeline."
Lena, watching hungrily from her vantage post, noted Mr. Early's
obsequious courtesies, Madeline's flushed face, and drew angry
conclusions. Nevertheless, she leaned forward and bowed graciously as
Madeline drove past.
"If she should marry Mr. Early, I shouldn't feel as if I had triumphed a
bit in getting Dick away from her," she said to herself, with a bald
comprehension of her true state of mind. For Lena made up for her pose
toward others by a certain unimaginative frankness in her
self-communings.
Then, catching a glimpse of another figure, she exclaimed, "Oh, there
comes Miss Huntress!" and immediately settled herself with an air of
elegant leisure to receive her former superior. Miss Huntress was a
source of continual satisfaction to Lena, the opposite of a skeleton at
the feast, a continual reminder of present prosperity as compared with
past nonentity. To meet her gave Madame Cecropia the same thrill of
satisfaction that it still did to draw her dainty skirts around her and
step into her carriage, half hoping that some envious girl was viewing
her perfections as she had once eyed those of others. On the other hand,
Miss Huntress derived almost equal pleasure out of her acquaintance with
Lena, whose littleness she measured, and whose small successes she
looked upon with amusement, unflecked by envy. Emily Huntress was a
plodding person, with much business on hand and an earnest necessity for
earning money, and though her canons were not over fine, still she had
her standards and lived up to them. She found Lena useful as a source of
social information.
"You want to know what is going on?" inquired Mrs. Percival. "Well, of
course you know it's Lent, and there isn't anything much. But if you
will come up to my boudoir, I will look over my engagement book, and
perhaps I can help you to a paragraph or two."
The word boudoir was a sweetmeat to Lena's palate, combined, as it was,
with the knowledge that her visitor, with a sister, kept house in three
rooms.
So they went up stairs, and Lena babbled and preened herself, while Miss
Huntress frowned and pondered on the difficulties of making anything
readable out of her small kernel of information. The arrival of a cup of
tea, Miss Huntress, being a woman as well as a reporter, found
mollifying to the hardness of life.
"I see," she said with an acid little laugh, "you have the Chatterer
up here in your unholy of unholies." Her eyes fell on a small magazine
which made a speciality of besmirching the good names of the entire
country. "Everybody reads it, and everybody pretends to despise it."
"It's awfully interesting," said Lena, and she went on with a little
giggle, "I think I'll just tuck it away before my husband comes in. He
doesn't approve of it, you know. Men don't care for gossip. I think it
is perfectly wonderful what an amount of scandal it gets hold of. I
don't see how they do it. And they've such a naughty way of writing it
up, too."