Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/326

Rh concerned. Bessy alone seemed deaf to the rumours about her friend. There was something captivating to her in Mrs. Carbury’s slang and noise, in her defiance of decorum and contempt of criticism. “I like Blanche because she doesn’t pretend,” was Bessy’s vague justiﬁcation of the lady; but in reality she was under the mysterious spell which such natures cast over the less venturesome imaginations of their own sex.

Amherst at ﬁrst tried to deaden himself to the situation, as part of the larger coil of miseries in which he found himself; but all his traditions were against such tolerance, and they were roused to revolt by the receipt of a newspaper clipping, sent by an anonymous hand, enlarging on the fact that the clandestine meetings of a fashionable couple were being facilitated by the connivance of a Long Island châtelaine. Amherst, hot from the perusal of this paragraph, sprang into the ﬁrst train, and laid the clipping before his father-in-law, who chanced to be passing through town on his way from the Hudson to the Hot Springs.

Mr. Langhope, ensconced in the cushioned privacy of the reading-room at the Amsterdam Club, where he had invited his son-in-law to meet him, perused the article with the cool eye of the collector to whom a new curiosity is offered.

“I suppose,” he mused, “that in the time of the [ 310 ]