第2章

Mildred flushed and her eyes flashed.She opened her lips to speak--closed them again with the angry retort unuttered.After all, Frank was her mother's and her sole dependence.They could hope for little from him, but nothing must be said that would give him and his mean, selfish wife a chance to break with them and refuse to do anything whatever.

``And Mildred must get married,'' said Natalie.

In Hanging Rock most of the girls and many of the boys had given names taken from Burke's Peerage, the Almanac de Gotha, and fashionable novels.

Again Mildred flushed; but her eyes did not flash, neither did she open her lips to speak.The little remark of her sister-in-law, apparently so harmless and sensible, was in fact a poisoned arrow.For Mildred was twenty-three, had been ``out'' five years, and was not even in the way to become engaged.She and everyone had assumed from her lovely babyhood that she would marry splendidly, would marry wealth and social position.How could it be otherwise? Had she not beauty? Had she not family and position? Had she not style and cleverness? Yet--five years out and not a ``serious'' proposal.An impudent poor fellow with no prospects had asked her.An impudent rich man from fashionable New York had hung after her --and had presently abandoned whatever dark projects he may have been concealing and had married in his own set, ``as they always do, the miserable snobs,''

raved Mrs.Gower, who had been building high upon those lavish outpourings of candy, flowers, and automobile rides.Mildred, however, had accepted the defection more philosophically.She had had enough vanity to like the attentions of the rich and fashionable New Yorker, enough good sense to suspect, perhaps not definitely, what those attentions meant, but certainly what they did not mean.Also, in the back of her head had been an intention to refuse Stanley Baird, if by chance he should ask her.Was there any substance to this intention, sprung from her disliking the conceited, self-assured snob as much as she liked his wealth and station? Perhaps not.Who can say? At any rate, may we not claim credit for our good intentions--so long as, even through lack of opportunity, we have not stultified them?

With every natural advantage apparently, Mildred's failure to catch a husband seemed to be somehow her own fault.Other girls, less endowed than she, were marrying, were marrying fairly well.Why, then, was Mildred lagging in the market?

There may have been other reasons, reasons of accident--for, in the higher class matrimonial market, few are called and fewer chosen.There was one reason not accidental; Hanging Rock was no place for a girl so superior as was Mildred Gower to find a fitting husband.As has been hinted, Hanging Rock was one of those upper-middle-class colonies where splurge and social ambition dominate the community life.In such colonies the young men are of two classes--those beneath such a girl as Mildred, and those who had the looks, the manners, the intelligence, and the prospects to justify them in looking higher socially--in looking among the very rich and really fashionable.In the Hanging Rock sort of community, having all the snobbishness of Fifth Avenue, Back Bay, and Rittenhouse Square, with the added torment of the snobbishness being perpetually ungratified--in such communities, beneath a surface reeking culture and idealistic folderol, there is a coarse and brutal materialism, a passion for money, for luxury, for display, that equals aristocratic societies at their worst.No one can live for a winter, much less grow up, in such a place without becoming saturated with sycophantry.Thus, only by some impossible combination of chances could there have been at Hanging Rock a young man who would have appreciated Mildred and have had the courage of his appreciation.This combination did not happen.

In Mildred's generation and set there were only the two classes of men noted above.The men of the one of them which could not have attracted her accepted their fate of mating with second-choice females to whom they were themselves second choice.The men of the other class rarely appeared at Hanging Rock functions, hung about the rich people in New York, Newport, and on Long Island, and would as soon have thought of taking a Hanging Rock society girl to wife as of exchanging hundred-dollar bills for twenty-five-cent pieces.Having attractions acceptable in the best markets, they took them there.Hanging Rock denounced them as snobs, for Hanging Rock was virtuously eloquent on the subject of snobbishness--we human creatures being never so effective as when assailing in others the vice or weakness we know from lifelong, intimate, internal association with it.But secretly the successfully ambitious spurners of that suburban society were approved, were envied.And Hanging Rock was most gracious to them whenever it got the chance.