The house was one where people might chat a long time together without publicly committing themselves to an interest in each other except such a grew out of each other's ideas.Miss Vance was there because she united in her catholic sympathies or ambitions the objects of the fashionable people and of the aesthetic people who met there on common ground.It was almost the only house in New York where this happened often,and it did not happen very often there.It was a literary house,primarily,with artistic qualifications,and the frequenters of it were mostly authors and artists;Wetmore,who was always trying to fit everything with a phrase,said it was the unfrequenters who were fashionable.There was great ease there,and simplicity;and if there was not distinction,it was not for want of distinguished people,but because there seems to be some solvent in New York life that reduces all men to a common level,that touches everybody with its potent magic and brings to the surface the deeply underlying nobody.The effect for some temperaments,for consciousness,for egotism,is admirable;for curiosity,for hero worship,it is rather baffling.It is the spirit of the street transferred to the drawing-room;indiscriminating,levelling,but doubtless finally wholesome,and witnessing the immensity of the place,if not consenting to the grandeur of reputations or presences.
Beaton now denied that this house represented a salon at all,in the old sense;and he held that the salon was impossible,even undesirable,with us,when Miss Vance sighed for it.At any rate,he said that this turmoil of coming and going,this bubble and babble,this cackling and hissing of conversation was not the expression of any such civilization as had created the salon.Here,he owned,were the elements of intellectual delightfulness,but he said their assemblage in such quantity alone denied the salon;there was too much of a good thing.
The French word implied a long evening of general talk among the guests,crowned with a little chicken at supper,ending at cock-crow.Here was tea,with milk or with lemon-baths of it and claret-cup for the hardier spirits throughout the evening.It was very nice,very pleasant,but it was not the little chicken--not the salon.In fact,he affirmed,the salon descended from above,out of the great world,and included the aesthetic world in it.But our great world--the rich people,were stupid,with no wish to be otherwise;they were not even curious about authors and artists.Beaton fancied himself speaking impartially,and so he allowed himself to speak bitterly;he said that in no other city in the world,except Vienna,perhaps,were such people so little a part of society.
"It isn't altogether the rich people's fault,"said Margaret;and she spoke impartially,too."I don't believe that the literary men and the artists would like a salon that descended to them.Madame Geoffrin,you know,was very plebeian;her husband was a business man of some sort.""He would have been a howling swell in New York,"said Beaton,still impartially.
Wetmore came up to their corner,with a scroll of bread and butter in one hand and a cup of tea in the other.Large and fat,and clean-shaven,he looked like a monk in evening dress.
"We were talking about salons,"said Margaret.
"Why don't you open a salon yourself?"asked Wetmore,breathing thickly from the anxiety of getting through the crowd without spilling his tea.
"Like poor Lady Barberina Lemon?"said the girl,with a laugh."What a good story!That idea of a woman who couldn't be interested in any of the arts because she was socially and traditionally the material of them!
We can,never reach that height of nonchalance in this country.""Not if we tried seriously?"suggested the painter."I've an idea that if the Americans ever gave their minds to that sort of thing,they could take the palm--or the cake,as Beaton here would say--just as they do in everything else.When we do have an aristocracy,it will be an aristocracy that will go ahead of anything the world has ever seen.
Why don't somebody make a beginning,and go in openly for an ancestry,and a lower middle class,and an hereditary legislature,and all the rest?We've got liveries,and crests,and palaces,and caste feeling.
We're all right as far as we've gone,and we've got the money to go any length.""Like your natural-gas man,Mr.Beaton,"said the girl,with a smiling glance round at him.
"Ah!"said Wetmore,stirring his tea,"has Beaton got a natural-gas man?""My natural-gas man,"said Beaton,ignoring Wetmore's question,"doesn't know how to live in his palace yet,and I doubt if he has any caste feeling.I fancy his family believe themselves victims of it.They say --one of the young ladies does--that she never saw such an unsociable place as New York;nobody calls.""That's good!"said Wetmore."I suppose they're all ready for company,too:good cook,furniture,servants,carriages?""Galore,"said Beaton.
"Well,that's too bad.There's a chance for you,Miss Vance.Doesn't your philanthropy embrace the socially destitute as well as the financially?Just think of a family like that,without a friend,in a great city!I should think common charity had a duty there--not to mention the uncommon."He distinguished that kind as Margaret's by a glance of ironical deference.She had a repute for good works which was out of proportion to the works,as it always is,but she was really active in that way,under the vague obligation,which we now all feel,to be helpful.She was of the church which seems to have found a reversion to the imposing ritual of the past the way back to the early ideals of Christian brotherhood.
"Oh,they seem to have Mr.Beaton,"Margaret answered,and Beaton felt obscurely flattered by her reference to his patronage of the Dryfooses.
He explained to Wetmore:"They have me because they partly own me.
