David Graham Phillips

“ Honoria smiled to herself. “She wants to marry him,” she thought, “and she’s building a fire under her imagination. I might have known it. She’s the very person to weave romance over a title and imagine it all gospel. What a poser!” To Catherine she said: “He’s a decent enough chap, Caterina. And you’ll admire him more than ever when you’ve read him up in Burke’s Peerage and looked at the pictures he’s given me of Beauvais House.” ”

“ There were two faces out there in the blackness into which they were staring, but each was seeing only one.
“One ought to get over it—one must,” she said slowly, “when one finds that the person one cared for is a bad lot. But”—she sighed under her breath—“I might marry, yes, would, if I needed a home or money. But I don’t. So I shall be much better contented alone. I’ll never believe deeply in any human being again.”
“You mustn’t take life so seriously,” he said gently. “You’ll change before——”
[34] “So my father thinks.” She looked at Frothingham with a mischievous, audacious smile. ”

“ Staunton and Frothingham started. “If you came really to know this country,” she went on, “you’d find out that just as soon as people here begin to pose as ‘our best people,’ ‘our best society,’ and all that rot, they begin to amount to nothing. They’re has-beens, or on the way to it. We don’t stand still here—not even in Boston. We’re always going up or coming down.”
After a silence Mrs. Staunton ventured to say, “I think you’ll find, Lord Frothingham, that the tone of Boston is, as I told you, far higher than New York’s.” ”

“ But Frothingham was more comfortable than he had been since the day before he left Lake-in-the-Wood. Mrs. Ridgie would live in free-and-easy fashion—one could smoke through all the house; there were drinks and plenty of good cigars and cigarettes available at all times; and the talk was the unpretentious gossip and slang of fast sets everywhere—intelligent people intelligently frivolous. ”

“ There was no alternative—he must go; he must marry money. He owed it to his family and position; also, he wanted it himself—what is a “gentleman” without money? And—why, if he did not bestir himself he might actually have to go to work! And “what the devil could I work at? I might go out to service—I’d shine as a gentleman’s gentleman—or I might do something as a billiard marker——”
With such dangers and degradations imminent, to think of love was sheer madness. Frothingham sighed and stared miserably through his monocle at the peacocks squawking their nerve-jarring predictions of rain. ”

“ We haven’t the tradition—our tradition is all against it. Whenever we do produce a thoroughly idle and inane person, he or she goes abroad to live, or else loses all his money to some sharp, pushing fellow, and drops out of sight. All this aristocracy you see is pure pose. Underneath, they’re Americans.”
“What is an American?” asked Frothingham. “Every time I think I’ve seen one, along comes some native and tells me I’m wrong. Are you an American?”
“Underneath—yes. On the surface—no. I used to be, but now I’m posing with the rest of ’em. You’ll have to get out of New York to see Americans. ”

“ You are not a foolish girl. You are not a child. You know what the substantial things in life are.”
“I can’t marry him,” repeated Catherine stubbornly.
“Has Wallingford been making love to you?” [88] The anger was close to the surface in Mrs. Hollister’s voice.
Catherine smiled bitterly. “No,” she answered, “he has not. He cares nothing for me. But I can’t marry Lord Frothingham—and I won’t.”
“You must not say that, Catherine,” said her mother sternly. “It is a great shock to me to find that you cannot be trusted. ”

“ Honoria looked disdainful. “And they are like us, the most of them—expatriated. They say their country is a good place to make money in, but a horrible place to live—crude and ill-mannered, full of vulgar people that push in everywhere, and the servants fancying they’re ladies and gentlemen.”
“I hope it’s no worse to live in than England,” said Frothingham. “You know we’re always flying to the Continent to escape the climate and the dulness. And our middle-classes are very uppish nowadays, don’t you think?” ”

“ But he ventured only, “I’m certain, sir, from what I know of your daughter and Lord Frothingham that money could have no influence with them one way or the other.”
Hooper smiled cynically. “It’s human nature,” he said. “The hand that feeds is the hand that’s licked. I’ll give ’em all they need whenever they need it. Do you suppose I’ve no pride in my daughter, in seeing that she makes a good appearance over there? But a million and a half is my outside figure for settlements.” ”

“ But she’s like a lot of the women in this town. They haven’t any emotions to speak of—nothing emotional happens. But they think they ought to have emotions such as they read about, and so they fake ’em. Then, they’ve got the craze for culture. They haven’t the time to get the real thing—they’re too busy showing off. Besides, they’re too lazy. So they fake culture, too. Oh, yes, they’re clever. And they look so well that you like the fake as they parade it better than the real thing.”
“We have that sort in London,” said Frothingham. ”

“ Honoria was remembering the past; Frothingham was brooding over the future. If he had dared he would have proposed to her. “She’d make a satisfactory wife,” he said to himself. “She’s just enough English to understand me and to make my people like her. She wouldn’t get on their nerves. And she doesn’t talk through her nose except when she’s excited. She’s a little too clever—but a steady goer, once the harness is on. If I could get her it would be good business, good swift business.”
“You’re a queer sort,” he said to her suddenly. “Most girls are full of getting married. ”

“ But women must always repress their real selves.”
Frothingham looked stolid and hopeless. Whenever conversation turned on abstractions he felt like a man fumbling and stumbling about in a London fog. “Really?” he said. “Really, now?”
“I don’t know why women fancy they must be liars,” said Honoria. “Do you mind dining at Sherry’s to-night?” Catherine in her psychological moods bored her. She sometimes ventured on aërial flights, but had no fancy for aërial flounderings.
“Sherry’s? That will be delightful! I like dining at restaurants—I’m very American in that respect.” ”

“ I’ve no great fancy for marrying—never had. I’ve always thought it a poor business—one of the sort of things that are good for the women and children, you know, but not for the men.”
Mrs. Staunton looked mild and humourous disapproval. “What is the world coming to? A man asked me the other day why all the nice women were married and all the nice men single. I hadn’t thought of it until he spoke. But I must say it’s true of my acquaintances.”
“I hope you’ll let Mr. Allerton know he’s wrong,” said Frothingham. “I hate it that the poor girl’s had the screws put on her on my account.” ”

“ As if in answer to this, Senator Ballantyne said to him, in a tone of humourous apology: “Our constituents are plain people, Lord Frothingham—honest, simple. They lead quiet, old-fashioned lives. I always send my family away or make them ‘come off their perch’ when I have to receive anyone from home—that is, any but my regular political lieutenants. To tell you the gospel truth, I’m ashamed to have my old friends see how absurd we’ve become.”
At six o’clock Frothingham was idling in a small smoking room in the rear of the great parlour—it was on the second floor. ”

“ Frothingham thought Ridgie Staunton “a harmless sort, a bit loud and noisy,” but well-meaning, and good enough except when he had his occasional brief spasmodic fits of remembering his early training, and feeling that his mode of life was all wrong. He was, in his wife’s opinion, a perfect husband, except that he hung about so much.
“What do your English women do with their husbands, Lord Frothingham?” she said. “It’s a horrible nuisance, having a man—a husband—round all day long with nothing to do. I try to drive Ridgie out to work. But he’s a lazy dog. ”

“ HERE commonplace, every-day, ordinary people tread the boards. The characters whom Miss Wyatt presents are not geniuses, or heroes, or heroines of romance, but commonplace persons with commonplace tricks and commonplace manners and emotions. They do romantic things without a sense of romance in them, but weave their commonplace doings into a story of great human interest that the reader will find far from commonplace. The vein of humorous satire, keen, subtle and refined, permeating the story and the characterization, sets this work of Miss Wyatt’s in a class by itself. ”

“ All the sensible people in the country must be laughing at us. Pardon me, Lord Frothingham—I’m very indignant at what I regard as superstitions and impostors. It’s only my view.”
“Not at all, not at all,” said Frothingham with an uneasy glance at Cecilia’s angry face. “I’m not one of those who wish all to believe alike. What the devil should we do if we hadn’t each other’s opinions to laugh at?”
“You’re such an ardent disciple,” continued Miss Gillett, “you ought to go to Yarrow’s Mrs. Ramsay. ”

“ We have a hard task in our country, Lord Frothingham, to keep the people with property in control.”
“It’s the same all over the world nowadays, I fancy,” said Frothingham. “One has to apologise for being well born or for living in decent style. The trouble with the lower classes at home is that they don’t have to work hard enough. They used to be too busy to look about and make themselves and everybody uncomfortable by doing what they call thinking.” ”

“ Grand opera bored him, so he passed the time in gazing round the grand-tier boxes—the Galloway box was to the left of the centre. The twilight was not dark enough to hide the part of the show that interested him. He knew New York fashionable society well now, and as he looked he noted each woman and recalled how many millions she represented. “Gad, how rich they are—these beggars,” he thought enviously. And he was seized by a mild attack of what an eminent New York lawyer describes as “the fury of the parasite”—that hate which succeeds contempt in the parasite as its intended victim eludes it. ”

“ Ridgie rose. “I’ll see you at dinner,” she said to Frothingham. “I’ll forgive you for being so cross to me, belle-mère,” she said to Mrs. Staunton, patting her on the cheek. Then her pretty little figure and pretty, pert face vanished. Mrs. Staunton frowned at the place where she had been—she disliked Virgie’s hoydenish movements almost as much as her demonstrativeness; in her opinion, “no thoroughly respectable woman laughs loudly, uses slang, or indulges in public kissing and embracing.” ”

“ And the next time he met Hooper he treated him not as an American and an equal, but as an Englishman and an inferior. And Amzi at once fell into his “place,” just as a car horse, though elevated to be a coach horse, will halt at one ring of a bell. “It’s in the blood,” thought Frothingham. “It can’t be hid or got out.” But—he didn’t venture the experiment with the daughter. ”

“ It is a capital story that will keep a reader’s interest from the first appearance of its hero, the young doctor Neal Robeson, to his final triumph—his triumph over himself and over the lawless, turbulent oil-drillers, his success in his profession and in his love affair. It displays a delightful appreciation of the essential points of typical American characters, a happy outlook on every-day life, a vigorous story-telling ability working in material that is thrilling in interest, in a setting that is picturesque and unusual. ”

“ Frothingham’s “representative” was Lawrence, attorney to the British Consulate at Chicago, a brother of Gerald Boughton’s mother. He had come to America thirty years before because he could make a living here and could not make a living at home. He had renounced allegiance to the British throne because by doing so his income was doubled. But at heart he regarded himself as a British subject and, while he pretended to be an American, was so savagely critical of things American that everyone disliked him. He wore the long, slim side-whiskers which were the fashion when he left home ”

“ Boughton is his granduncle’s heir and his granduncle is old and a widower—still—well, the dukedom might slip away from him. For instance, he might die before his granduncle.”
“That would be ghastly for her, wouldn’t it, now?” said Frothingham.
“It would kill poor Ysobel. She’s so proud and ambitious! And that’s why she has an eye for the Prince—he’s of a frightfully old family, you know. One of his ancestors tried to poison Cesare Borgia and did succeed in getting himself poisoned or smothered or something thrilling. And they were an old, old family then. Oh, Ysobel is flying high. ”

“ You must remember that we haven’t any classes here, but are all of one class—we differ in degree, but not in kind. One can’t look into the future. I only know it was intended for the light to shine on the whole human race, and that it’s our duty to help all we can. And knowledge is light, and ignorance is darkness, isn’t it? ”

“ Catherine, Countess of Frothingham!”
“How can you be so coarse-fibred in some ways, Joe, and so fine in others?” she said reproachfully.
“I don’t know, dear lady. I suppose because I’m human—just like you.”
“Let us dance,” was her only reply. She had known Joe so long that she couldn’t help liking him, but he certainly was trying.
Later in the evening, remembering Joe’s cruelty and sordidness, she said to Frothingham: “You don’t know what a pleasure it is to the finer women over here to meet foreign men. They are so much more subtle and sympathetic. They are not coarsened by business. ”

“ Her eyelids lifted languidly and she gave Cecilia her hand—a pretty hand, slender and sensitive.
“Good-morning, my dear,” she said. “This is the Earl of Frothingham, is it not?”
At this both Cecilia and Frothingham started—Cecilia because it was another and impressive evidence of Mrs. Ramsay’s power; Frothingham because he knew that voice so well. His knees weakened and he looked at Mrs. Ramsay again.
But she was not looking at him. She was saying to Cecilia: “Dr. Yarrow was here for two hours—he left not twenty minutes ago. I am so exhausted!” ”