Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/94

 She wanted notice and flattery and no one in Brinoë noticed her and no one flattered her save a little group of Marchesas, Principessas and Contessas, all old and dowdy and poor who thought they might get something from her. At first the mention of their titles pleased her and then she made the disillusioning discovery that Marchesas and Contessas were as thick as flies in Italy, and her natural shrewdness told her that they were simply leeches. People in Brinoë seemed not to be interested in Messages and clung stubbornly to conventional forms of religion. Two years of campaigning had brought her nowhere.

Being entirely without sensibility she was never bored and so could not understand boredom in others. She did not know into what depths of boredom she had plunged her three visitors that very afternoon. She never imagined the depths of boredom in which poor Miss Fosdick had spent the better part of twenty years,—depths so profound that at times she goaded Mrs. Weatherby into abusing her simply for the sake of change. It had never occurred to her, who had known such triumphs in Carmel and Los Angeles, that in Brinoë she was regarded simply as a colossal bore from whom people fled after one meeting as from a plague. She, the imposing Henrietta Weatherby!

She had a passion for knowing what she called "interesting people," and Brinoë, she felt, must be alive with "interesting people"—writers, painters, musicians and others who were simply "characters." It was simply a matter of meeting them. She firmly and naïvely believed that parties made up of people