Читать книгу The Teacup Club - Elisa Armstrong Bengough - Страница 4

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The Teacup club was called to order fifteen minutes before the appointed time at its second meeting. “We are all here, you know, and there is no use in waiting,” observed the president, as she rapped for order with a jeweled hatpin.

“Hear, hear,” said the girl with the Roman nose, who had been reading up in parliamentary usage.

“I am so glad to see you all here,” said the president, “I was afraid that Effie’s luncheon might—”

“Keep some of us away? Not from this club,” said the girl with the classic profile. “I believe she chose the day just on purpose to break up the meeting, so I declined her invitation.”

“Did you?” said the girl with the Roman nose, “I didn’t. Effie is not popular enough to offer her guests badly cooked food, so I went and excused myself as soon as we rose from the table on the plea that I should be late for the club if I remained longer.”

“I wish I might have seen Effie when you said that,” remarked the girl with the eyeglasses. “However, your turn came when the door closed after you.”

“I think not, dear,” said the girl with the Roman nose, calmly, “Effie is not yet distinctly engaged to my cousin Clarence, so—”

“She has to be on decent terms with his family! I might have thought of that,” said the girl with the eyeglasses.

“If they had been married, now of course I shouldn’t have dared to do it, but—”

“I should think not. Oh, girls, speaking of what happens after the door closes, makes me think of what happened to Effie herself once. It was just after the affair with Teddy Crœsus, you know.”

“The time she thought to make people believe she was engaged to him, and took him to dine with her grandmother—”

“And her grandmother failed to understand the situation and congratulated them! Indeed, I do,” cried the girl with the Roman nose, “although, on account of being her dearest friend, I failed to hear it until two days after everybody else had.”

“Well, you know she went to a breakfast at Nell’s a few days after that,” went on the girl with the eyeglasses, “and left early. As she reached the corner, she remembered a message for Nell and went back to deliver it. She burst into the room unannounced and found all the girls talking at once.”

“About her, of course! What did—”

“Yes. Any other girl would have known that, but Effie said: ‘Oh, girls, do tell me all about it; what has happened?’”

“Well?”

“And it was so sudden that not one of them could think of a thing to say until she had flounced out in a rage!”

“The moral is: Never go back after once saying good-by,” said the president.

“True,” said the brown-eyed blonde, “by the way, Dorothy, why weren’t you at Effie’s to-day?”

“I fancy my invitation was lost in the mail,” replied the blue-eyed girl. “I shall mention it to Effie as soon as I see her, so she will not feel that I’ve slighted her intentionally. Why, Frances, dear, did those mean things let you sit all through luncheon with the end of your, ah—detachable hair showing and a dab of powder on your nose? How mean and envious some people are!”

“I—I think it is cooler over on the other side,” panted the brown-eyed blonde, “and besides I must see Emily a minute.”

“Why, Dorothy, you must have just heard something awfully nice, you look so happy and smiling,” said the girl with the classic profile, “but really this delightful club is making us all amiable.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” said the blue-eyed girl, “I couldn’t be really mean to anybody now, if I tried.”

“Excuse me for interrupting you, girls,” said the president, “but I want to announce our topic for discussion, and if I don’t do it at once I may forget it. Suppose we choose “Woman as a Political Factor?” That is a broad enough field even for us, and—”

“So it is,” said the girl with the eyeglasses. “Well, I know one thing—whenever a woman really knows what she wants in a political line, she gets it.”

“She does—and has ever since Eve held that first caucus with the serpent in the garden,” said the girl with the dimple in her chin.

“Hear, hear!” cried the girl with the Roman nose, who had been furtively consulting her book on parliamentary usage. “Oh, girls, have you heard that the man Nell expects to marry is a politician?”

“No; but it seems a very suitable match,” said the president, “for I don’t know a girl anywhere who can shake hands as gracefully as she does.”

“Dear me, Evelyn, how generous you are,” said the girl with the eyeglasses. “I believe you could find something nice to say about everybody.”

“I really believe I could,” said the president, modestly, “and, after all, it is easy enough, for if you don’t like the subject of your remarks, you can always say it in such a tone that it does more harm than good.”

“You are so just,” sighed the girl with the classic profile, “and yet, men always declare there is no real fellowship among women!”

“They confuse their own wish with the true state of affairs,” said the girl with the dimple in her chin. “They know that one woman is often more than a match for the whole male sex and when a number of women band together they—”

“Usually get more than they want,” said the president. “I often wonder, though, why it is always so much easier to convince other men that you are in the right than it is to persuade the men of your own family?”

“Perhaps we put it in a more flattering way to strangers,” suggested the girl with the dimple in her chin, “we just can’t help it, though, for we can’t always be—”

“Looking up?” said the girl with the Roman nose. “Of course not—if we were our necks would grow so stiff that—”

“We could never see our own boots; besides, we would be such frights that no man would look at us and so—”

“It would do no good in the end,” finished the blue-eyed girl. “Still, I sometimes fancy, after all, that it might be well to be as nice to papa and the boys as I am to the men I dance with!”

“My goodness,” said the girl with the dimple in her chin, “we must be getting into metaphysics now! I’m not quite sure as to what metaphysics may be, so I always conclude that everything I don’t understand must—”

“Be metaphysics? Do you? For my part, I always confuse metaphysics with hydraulics, though there is some difference between them I know,” said the brown-eyed blonde. “Let us ask Evelyn to explain them right now. She—”

“Some other time, dear;” said the president, hastily. “You know we are discussing Woman in Politics to-day and—”

“It would be unparliamentary to discuss anything else,” said the girl with the Roman nose.

The president looked at her gratefully.

“What a logical mind you have, dear,” she said. “I only wish you could be with me sometimes when Tom comes home late from his club. I know that there are all sorts of flaws in the stories he tells me, but somehow I never find them until after he has given me money and I’ve kissed him and made up.”

“What a pity,” sighed the girl with the Roman nose, “for if you found out the real flimsiness of his stories sooner, you could get more money.”

“Oh, dear, so I could,” wailed the president, “it is an awful thing to have a husband and not a logical mind!”

“So it is,” said the girl with the Roman nose, “but, Evelyn, don’t tell anybody your opinion of me, for if you do, it may end in my having a logical mind and no husband, which is worse!”

“Oh, isn’t this beautiful!” cried the girl with the eyeglasses, suddenly. “Really, girls, I am so stupid—that is not stupid as compared to a man, of course, but to the rest of you—that I wonder you allow me to belong to the club!” and there were tears in her eyes as she spoke.

The president came down from the platform and kissed her.

“Stupid! the idea of a girl with such a genius for hairdressing being stupid,” she cried.

“And that girl a chafing-dish cook whose Welsh rarebits are sometimes successful, too!” cried the brown-eyed blonde.

“Oh! speaking of chafing-dish cookery,” said the girl with the dimple in her chin. “You know that Annie used to be engaged to Eustace, don’t you?”

“Yes. But what has that to do with chafing-dish cookery?” said the girl with the Roman nose. “Girls, I have the loveliest recipe for making—”

“It has a great deal to do with it. When he married Claire, Annie just smiled and selected a chafing-dish as a wedding present. She knew that Eustace was a confirmed dyspeptic and that Claire’s hands are so pretty that she could not possibly resist an opportunity to display them, so she would cook all sorts of dishes and—”

“By the way, I hear that they have agreed to separate,” said the president. “I met Claire on the way to the manicure the other day. I wonder where Eustace is?”

“He is in a sanitarium,” replied the girl with the dimple in her chin, “the doctor thinks he will have to be taken into court on a stretcher when the divorce proceedings come up!”

“And yet you told me the other day that Annie had no originality; I’ve learned this since then,” whispered the girl with the dimple in her chin to the blue-eyed girl.

“I only meant in the matter of gowns, dear,” was the apologetic reply. “By the way, Frances seems not quite herself, to-day.”

“I’ve noticed that. I fancied you might have said something to her which—”

“Oh, never; why, I consider Frances one of my dearest friends—”

“I know that, dear. But what is the use of a friend, if you can’t be disagreeable to her sometimes?”

“True. I sometimes think it is one reason that married women keep their friends longer. They have husbands to—”

“Act as lightning rods and carry off their displeasure! Yes; it must really be quite a convenience.”

“Very likely. Don’t you feel, after all, that Jack—”

“Jack? Oh, I suppose you mean Mr. Bittersweet! No, I don’t feel any such thing, Emily Marshmallow, and you are no friend of mine if you champion him after the way he has behaved to me!”

“I—I was only going to mention that he had resigned from that new club. He told me so himself.”

“Oh, he has, has he? Well, isn’t that just like a man? And after he had paid all his dues for a year in advance, too, and gotten nothing out of it!”

“Perhaps he—he did it hoping to please you, dear.”

“His actions are perfectly indifferent to me, I assure you. Besides, if I made up with him to-morrow, Frances would always think I was jealous. I jealous of her—the idea! And, oh, Emily, the way he—he flirts with that girl is enough to b—break my heart!”

“If you two girls have anything interesting to say, I wish you would say it aloud,” broke in the president. “Of course I am not curious, but some of the others may—”

“Nothing at all interesting,” said the blue-eyed girl, promptly; “I—I was just telling Emily that this club seems the one thing needed to fill my cup of happiness to overflowing!”

“And mine!” said the girl with the Roman nose. “By the way, isn’t it too provoking that curls are coming in again, just as veils are going out!”

“And just at the windiest season of the year, too,” wailed the brown-eyed blonde. “Really, I often think that the fashions are invented by men—they are so contrary!”

“Pardon me,” said the president, “I did not quite catch what you were saying, because Emily and Marion were both talking at the same time. It seems to me that since I have been married, I can’t follow even two conversations simultaneously, as I used.”

“Speaking of that,” said the girl with the eyeglasses, “who do you tell your secrets to now that you are married?”

“Why, I’ve hit on a splendid plan,” cried the president, “when I feel that I must just tell a secret or die—and I often feel that way—I wait until Tom is asleep and repeat the whole story in his ear. It relieves my mind and does no harm.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” said the girl with the dimple in her chin. “My sister Helen doesn’t agree with you at all. You mentioned it to her the other day and she thought it clever, and resolved to emulate your wisdom, so she tried it on her husband, and he wasn’t asleep, only pretending.”

“But I always test my husband with a question or two, first,” said the president.

“So did Helen. She asked him if he could fail to see how much she needed a new bonnet and wanted to know how much his share of the alumni banquet amounted to. He only snored in reply, and of course she thought she was safe and repeated the secret.”

“With the result?” queried the blue-eyed girl, who was listening, breathless.

“That it was all over his club the next day,” said the girl with the dimple in her chin. “It would not have made any difference,” she added, soberly, “only the secret was a rather clever trick I had played on Dick a few days before—and he belongs to the same club!”

“And yet they say a man can keep a secret!” said the girl with the Roman nose.

“Who says so?” queried the girl with the eyeglasses. “Other men? Oh! I didn’t know but that you had heard some woman say so.”

“Not unless a man was listening, dear, and that man a person whom—”

“She wished to flatter immensely!”

“Yes. Or who happened to know some of her own secrets! Girls, I’ve been wondering what on earth Annie sees in that horrid Fred Van Stupid? Now, I can understand the interest a girl takes in a brainless man who has a great deal of money, because then—”

“He is exposed to so many temptations and her influence is sure to do him good,” finished the girl with the dimple in her chin, “for my part, I always let Ned Goldie come to see me oftener than usual during Lent. I feel that I am really doing some good and—”

“Violets are an absolute necessity then and they are so dear that very few men can afford to present them in quantities.”

“Oh, of course I let him bring me flowers if he wants to—it is so much better for him to spend his money in that way than to lose it at poker, that I feel quite a missionary.”

“H’m; I don’t know about that, dear, though it’s very lovely of you to feel so,” sighed the president, “the fact is, that you are actually encroaching on what is really my violet money. Ned will play poker with my husband at the club at other seasons of the year, when he is not allowed to see much of you. He always loses and I make Tom divide his winnings with me, so—”

There was a look of high resolve upon the face of the girl with the dimple in her chin.

“After this, I shall make him bring me twice as many, so I can divide with you,” she said, sweetly. “Oh, no, don’t thank me; I do so love to feel that I am doing some good in the world and I do so disapprove of games of chance!”

“You haven’t made up your mind as to whether you will accept him or not, have you?” queried the brown-eyed blonde.

“Not yet, dear. His chances and Dick’s are about even, at present. Of course he doesn’t know that, though; I couldn’t exert such a good influence over him, if he was sure one way or the other.”

“True,” sighed the president. “Oh, girls, I don’t know why men are so much more willing to be influenced for good before they are married than after. You may be sure of one thing though, Emily; he will say horrid things about you, if you finally do refuse him.”

“No doubt,” said the girl with the dimple in her chin, “but when one tries to do good in this world, one can not begin to count the cost.”

“Oh, Emily Marshmallow, what an angel you are!” cried the blue-eyed girl, kissing her. “You are always so busy doing good to others, that you never seem to give yourself a thought!”

The brown-eyed blonde had by this time quite recovered her equanimity and was chatting, in low tones, with the girl who wore the eyeglasses.

“Poor, dear Dorothy is looking rather ill, isn’t she?” she remarked, after a while.

“Why, I hadn’t noticed it before, but now that you speak of it, she does. However, she can’t expect to look young always. By the way, I hear that she has quarreled with Jack Bittersweet again.”

“Has she seen him lately? I didn’t know that she had,” returned the brown-eyed blonde, smiling affectionately into the mirror.

“Your hair is looking lovely to-day,” returned the girl with the eyeglasses. “Look here, Frances, do, like a dear, tell me all about the quarrel. You know all about it, of course, and I’ll not tell a soul. You know how well I can keep a secret and, besides, you owe it to me, for you wouldn’t have known a thing about Fred and Clarissa but for me!”

“But I hadn’t a thing to do about the quarrel, oh, really now I hadn’t. Of course, people think it was all on my account but—why, I was in Omaha when I heard of it.”

“By the way you came back from Omaha earlier than you expected, didn’t you?”

“I—no; that is only a week earlier. How well Jack looks, doesn’t he? And what a flow of spirits he has.”

“Is it possible? Now, Effie says that he is as cross as a bear. But, then, Effie is his sister, so—”

“What she says is of no consequence. Well, since you know so much already, I may as well tell you the rest. I fear that it is Dorothy’s insane jealousy of me which made the trouble. Of course I have not a spark of vanity, but I can’t help seeing—”

“But I heard that the quarrel was over Jack’s membership in a new club.”

“That might have been, dear, but people that are engaged don’t always quarrel over the real bone of contention. Of course, I only hope I really had nothing to do with it; I have so many such things on my conscience already that I don’t want any more,” and she sighed softly.

“Yes, but tell me about the quarrel, do.”

“Well—er—the fact is that Jack hasn’t said a word to me about it, which makes me quite sure that I am the cause of it, unwilling as I am to think it.”

“Then, you really don’t know any of the facts?” said the girl with the eyeglasses. “Excuse me now, dear, I see Emily beckoning me; she wants to ask me about a new seamstress I’ve discovered. Frances doesn’t know a bit more than we do,” she whispered to the girl with the dimple in her chin. “Jack hasn’t told her a thing, so he evidently still cares for Dorothy, and she—”

“That’s just it,” wailed the girl with the dimple in her chin. “I’d have succeeded in making it up long ago, if they didn’t care quite so much!”

“Oh, dear,” said the president, “I am afraid that I am awfully stupid to-day, but the fact is that—”

“By the way, I heard that you slept at a hotel last night, Evelyn,” said the girl with the Roman nose, “how on earth did that happen?”

“It was all Tom’s fault,” returned the president, in an aggrieved tone, “only he, being a man, will not admit the fact. You see, he didn’t want to go to the reception at all, so he—”

“But, Nell said she met him in the street and gave him a verbal invitation, which he accepted with effusion.”

“Pshaw, if Nell knew my husband as well as I do, she’d be aware that the more affably he accepts an invitation, the more determined he is to escape by some plausible excuse at the last moment. He says that people always accept your regrets as genuine under such circumstances.”

“Thank you for telling me that,” said the girl with the classic profile. “My great aunt gives whist parties sometimes and, as she has a lot of lovely old lace and china and nobody in particular to leave it to, I don’t like to hurt her feelings by refusing her invitations outright. On the other hand, if I accept and happen to be placed at the table with her, I know I shall not receive so much as a cracked saucer in her will!”

“But you and Tom did go to the reception, I know, for I saw you there,” said the girl with the Roman nose, “how did you manage it?”

“To make him go? Oh, that was easy enough. I merely said that he wasn’t very well and as I did not like to go out and leave him alone, I would ask mamma to come and stay with him.”

“Oh, then he agreed to go, did he?”

“Yes, dear—said he had meant to go all along. But after that everything went wrong: his razor refused to do its work and he actually pretended that it was all because I had sharpened a lead pencil with it the other day, as if that could have—”

“But why did you tell him that you had sharpened your pencil with it?” asked the blue-eyed girl.

“Because I cut my finger on the old thing and thoughtfully warned him that it was too sharp. Then, I—well my own wardrobe was full and I had hung up a few things in his, and the skirt of my new tailor-made gown was hanging over his dress coat. He pretended that it was all wrinkled and creased by that. Then, I had borrowed his box of neckties and neglected to return them, and he made such a fuss over my forgetfulness that I determined to give him a lesson. I saw him lay his latch key on the chiffonier ready to put in his other pocket and I didn’t say a word when he turned out the gas and went off without it.”

“But how did you expect to get into the house when you returned?”

“Oh! I slipped back into the room in the dark after he had gone down, and put it in my own pocket.”

“As an object lesson in remembering. Good, I’m glad you did it,” said the girl with the eyeglasses.

“M’hm. I told the maid not to sit up for us, and I saw for myself that every door and window was fastened tight—for once Tom climbed in at the pantry window when he had forgotten his key and didn’t want me to know how late he stayed at the club.”

“I suppose he complained next day because the window was open, too,” murmured the girl with the dimple in her chin, “men are so illogical!”

“Well, no, dear; but he would have done so, only the clock happened to strike three as he came upstairs, and I counted the strokes aloud. Well Tom was cross at being kept waiting, but my gown fits so well that I felt at peace with all mankind.”

“Even your own husband!” said the brown-eyed blonde. “It must indeed fit well.”

“Yes. And I enjoyed the evening immensely, for I knew I had such a good joke on Tom when we got home.”

“Yes, and what happened then?” asked the girl with the eyeglasses.

“Oh, it was great fun. He searched in all his pockets twice, rang the bell until he was tired, though the maids asleep in the third story might as well have been in Greenland for all the good that did. Then, he tried to force each door and window before he came back to the carriage to tell me that we were locked out!”

“And then you—”

“I said: ‘Why didn’t you tell me before, dear? Luckily, there is one of us who remembers things.’ If you could only have seen his face as he took the key I gave him!”

“Then why on earth did you sleep at the hotel?” queried the girl with the Roman nose, in a bewildered tone.

“I—well, the fact is that I—in the dark, I had mistaken the key to his desk for the latch-key! And, oh, girls, if you had seen me driving home from the hotel at ten o’clock in the morning, in the gown I had worn at the reception!”

“You poor, dear thing!” cried the blue-eyed girl, “no wonder you chose ‘Woman in Politics’ for to-day’s discussion! If men are such tyrants as that, our only refuge will be equality in suffrage and—”

“Latchkeys,” said the girl with the eyeglasses, “though to be sure, we’d need pockets to keep them in, if we carried them. Sometimes, I suspect that the dressmakers are in league with the men to keep us from gaining our rights,” she added.

“Perhaps they are,” said the blue-eyed girl, with a startled air, “the men pay the bills and so the dressmakers may be in league with them!”

“You forget one thing, dear,” said the president, with a superior air. “It is the women who make the bills. You never heard of a man who ordered a dress for his wife did you?”

“I hope not,” replied the girl with the Roman nose, “at least, if she was obliged to wear it.”

“Well, dears,” said the president, “we really must adjourn, it is awfully late, but of course such a serious discussion could not be hurried. I think I must go and have a cup of bouillon to refresh me after making such serious demands upon the gray matter of my brain.”