CHAPTER XXVII

Those first months in Washington took all the concentrated social skill of Fliss. They were months when she felt with confusion that she was playing a game with experts who could not be tricked. In the first place she was only twenty-five, and youth, except in a débutante, was an anomaly in the groups to which she sought ingress. The wives of the other Senators had fifteen to forty years more to their credit than had she. In Carrington her youth had been an asset. The older matrons petted her and the younger ones envied her. But this was different. The qualities which were at a premium here were not mere dash and chic style and dancing ability. It took brains to be singled out here.

Luckily she had plenty of money, and she had availed herself of every possible letter of introduction before she left Carrington. There were people in Carrington who knew the people whose names she had studied in the Washington papers and she had managed, not seeming too eager, to have a letter written here and one there, and to see that the letters were followed up. Her first two weeks had been spent in house-hunting, during which she had had occasion to bless Matthew a thousand times for his affluence and generosity. She found at last what she wanted in the proper part of town--a conventional, not too large city house, tenanted by a Senator’s family last year. The Senator had gone to a club when his family went to Europe, and the house was available at an enormous rental. It had the advantage of having been decorated the year before by the Senator’s wife and done in admirable taste. Fliss sought an interior decorator, and with an uncanny shrewdness furnished it. There was enough of the solid to keep it from appearing faddish or nouveau; there was enough of the ugly to set off the beautiful. There was, last and most of all, quite enough of the beautiful to prove her taste.

The first weeks in Washington reminded Fliss somewhat grimly of her early encounters in Carrington. She went through the ordeal of the social column again--the ordeal of those who read about the functions to which they aspire and at which they were not attendant. Society columns are easy reading only for those who are quite indifferent to personal mention or omission, and they, of course, are the people who do not make a business of reading them. But Fliss had the comfort of never becoming despondent as she had in the old Carrington days. She had tools ready to her hand now and she meant to forge her way with them. More than that, she had found a work which was going to need all her wits and all her energies.

Matthew was busy constantly. He had been chosen for a good deal of routine committee work to break him in, and he had little time for Fliss and the observation of her labors. They went out together more than they had in Carrington, but it was to more formal affairs.

“Washington doesn’t tend to make you chummy,” she said, one night, leaning up against Matthew in the car as they were being whirled homeward after a rather colorless dinner.

“Finding it hard work?” he asked.

“I love it,” she said lazily. “I love the sense of social intrigue. There’s something to get your teeth into here. A lot to fight for. Out in Carrington, if you do get to the top, what is there at the top except Mrs. Silverton’s dinners? It’s fun, I mean, but it stops. You can see the top. Here it’s so much more tangled, but so much more interesting.”

“You’re doing it very well,” answered Matthew. “You quite charmed Senator Gates to-night. How did you do it?”

“Listened to him. Isn’t it queer how simple it is, as well as being so difficult? All I did was to flatter him a little--most of that by looking at him. But I had to be careful not to do it too much, because I mustn’t get the reputation of being a Western vamp. It’s just drawing that line.”

“Clever girl!”

“I wish you were susceptible to flattery,” she said irrelevantly, “and I’d tell you I thought you could give the bunch of them cards and spades.”

He patted her hand and then, apparently feeling that insufficient, turned her face up to his and kissed her. She flushed a little at the casual caress, and then turned to look out of the window. The street lamps showed on her face that little wistful, half appealing expression which was making her piquancy so much more mysterious.

“Do you like it all, Matthew?”

“I’m interested, Fliss. I’m finding out about lots of things I wondered about. Some are true and some aren’t. Of course, you mustn’t expect me to do much for years. I’m pretty crude. I’ve got to learn.”

“Crude! You should have heard the enlightened and important Senator Gates! He couldn’t be much cruder.”

“He has other assets. Don’t expect too much, Fliss.”

It was shortly after that that the Allenbys dined with Senator and Mrs. Gates, and from that dinner several important invitations fell the way of Fliss. It was, of course, not only on her own account. There were many people who felt that it was very much worth while to cultivate young Senator Allenby, and tipped their wives off to that effect.

Fliss began her campaign in December shortly after the opening of the session. She was quite as busy weeding out undesirable invitations and discouraging worthless acquaintances as she was angling for the right ones. The thing that surprised her was to find out that the worthless acquaintances included among their number so many people of superficial distinction, but distinction, as she came to find out, that impressed no one except the people on the street. One couldn’t go on the basis of clothes. The smart dressers too often didn’t belong and some one whose suit might be last season’s and whose hair was gray and worn without a Marcel might be a powerful or a charming person--one to cultivate. Her old training in being “nice” to the mothers of her high school friends stood her in good stead here. She knew how to treat older women, what sort of flattery they preferred and what sort of deference they exacted.

Always she watched for Matthew’s approval. She was interested in seeing the way so many Washington women followed every step of their husbands’ progress, and knew how to talk about it and how not to talk about it. She was not informed enough to get much of a grasp of big happenings, but she had an uncanny gift for getting at the pet phrases of people and never blundered as she repeated them. Then, too, she did not talk much and she read the newspapers for an hour every morning.

She was flowering, growing up, out of the little social climber she had been into the woman of social strength that she meant to be. Brilliant, colorful, utilitarian in every phase of her philosophy, except in that weakness which showed again and again in her efforts to reach Matthew.

In February she gave her first dinner. It was a small dinner, the dozen guests chosen with the utmost care and good taste. No one was there whom she did not have the right to ask, no one who would not feel in easy company with the rest of the guests, no one who was not a person of distinction either personally or by connection. She had appealed quite frankly to Mrs. Gates for advice, on the score of youth and not wishing to appear presumptuous, and Mrs. Gates had given her exceptionally good advice.

“Don’t try to do much, my dear. It’s apt to irritate people, especially at the height of the season when people are crowded. All you have to do here this year is to let people know that you are here. If you want to give a small dinner, let’s see (she looked at her calendar), try the third week in February.”

“It’s awfully good of you, Mrs. Gates, to help me. I feel so young and sometimes rather stranded because, you see, I never had to go ahead alone before. And after mother died, less than a year ago, I haven’t felt much like going out or being gay. I miss her, sadly.”

What was the perfect intonation which gave Mrs. Gates the idea that Fliss’s mother had been her social guidance until the hour of death? She smiled at Fliss kindly, pretty Fliss who had modified her mourning so that most people did not guess it was mourning and who stood before her now, swathed in soft black furs. Her references to Fliss after that were of the kind which helped immensely.

On the night of the little dinner Matthew looked at his wife in unmixed admiration. She had come into the pretty drawing-room a little before him and he found her there. To-night, too, she was dressed in black, black velvet which clung gently to her hips and emphasized her girlishness, yet giving her an air of dignity which he had never seen before. Her hair was changed from its Carrington arrangement. The black bang which she had clung to so long, because it was so becoming, had been sacrificed and her hair drawn straight back, showing the perfect white forehead and making her face seem more oval than before. The softest moon-white earrings and no other jewels at all.

“You’re lovely, Fliss.”

“I’m right,” answered Fliss, with assurance. “At least I’m right as far as looks go. And the table is right. Come see it.”

She led him into the paneled dining-room, where the mahogany caught the light from tall, unshaded wax tapers in their silver holders and the electric candles on the wall. The center of the table was bright with marigolds forced to a hothouse blossoming, setting off the silver and white and crystal of the whole.

“Is it right? Does it look splendid? No, not splendid, but as if we’d been giving dinners like this for years--as if our grandfathers had been doing it, too? No Peachtree or Carrington flats in the background?”

He laughed at her.

“It’s so stunning, Fliss, that it almost makes me feel a bit guilty. We mustn’t get so greedy for this sort of thing that we forget what I came down here for.”

“You remember all that,” broke in Fliss, returning to the drawing-room. “I’ll remember this part.”

Matthew listened to her as she stood greeting her guests with that little air of dignified deference and again as she sat opposite him, but rather far distant, listening, watching, always at work.

“Not many of your colleagues bring such young and beautiful women to Washington as you did,” commented his neighbor on the left.

Matthew smiled appreciatively.

“My wife may be my greatest contribution to Washington.”

“We hear good things of you already,” said the lady, who was elderly and kindly and had a fine Philadelphia manner. “But one of the best things we can hear is to hear of such devotion. It is good to see a man in love with his wife these days, Mr. Allenby.”

“Do you think it’s so rare?”

“I think we are creating an atmosphere in which it is harder to preserve simple emotions. I want to know your wife better and find out how she manages to be so skillful in so many things at such an early age.”

“Perhaps she won’t betray her secrets. But I will tell you a little. She does it because she is untiring and loves fine and beautiful things so much that she will do anything to obtain them.”

“You mustn’t make her seem so unscrupulous.”

“Aren’t charming women supposed to be unscrupulous?” asked Matthew, generalizing quickly.

“Women aren’t anything they are supposed to be. Less than ever just now. They are an agglomerate mass of individuals, no one of whom and no group of whom is strong enough to set the fashion for the rest of us. But now that we vote and move more acceptedly in general circles we may develop a new feminine type. Perhaps. We’ve tried to in the last fifty years. We tried the bicycle riding type and the masculinized college woman and the clubwoman type and the suffragist crusader and the newer college woman who goes in for sociology and the job-holding woman who was a war growth largely--I mean the woman who holds a job because she likes work and not because she couldn’t marry out of it. Well, all those types are experiments. They aren’t perfected types. The genuine old-fashioned housewife--domestic, motherly----”

“Not all of the old-fashioned women were like that,” Matthew checked her up amusedly.

“Put in your dash of courtesan, if you like, young man. That’s what you mean. It didn’t alter the general type. Women were women, then. Now, aside from physical similarities women are not women. You used to be able to group them by something else than physical qualities. But you can’t any more.”

“And what’s the answer?”

“Where did I start, and why did I start? My squab will be wrested from me in a minute. Wait until I have a bite.”

“You started from unscrupulous women. I think your first remark was that women aren’t anything they’re supposed to be.”

“Yes. Where I meant to end--and I can do it quickly--is to say that nothing any one can say applies to women as a class, for women no longer accept or believe in standards for themselves as a sex. They are creatures of shifting standards--unhappy or happy as the mood may strike them. They have no permanent standards.”

“No standards at all?”

“Oh, some of them cling to monogamy and some to fidelity, but is it from belief and real vivifying faith or is it, as Mrs. Gerould says, because they’ve been passed on the ethic? Is it because it’s more convenient to cling to the old fashions in morality and marriage laws? I ask it as a question. Do you know any women who would make a real sacrifice for the traditions of marriage and wifehood? Who hold those states in really reverential regard?”

Matthew was listening attentively.

“I know one woman who would,” he answered, “who would make sacrifices for the old ideal. Who holds marriage in such high regard that she can offer herself on its altar if she has to.”

His hearer looked down the length of the table at Fliss and smiled.

“You say that because you are in love with her,” she answered. “Well, maybe you’re right. But it’s a queer age. I sometimes think we need a new dictionary. My grandchildren--the youngest is ten and extremely sophisticated--talk a different language from mine. It doesn’t matter particularly.”

A queer look had come into Matthew’s eyes as the lady had assumed that his remark was a tribute to his wife.

“I can’t make out whether you’re a feminist or not.”

“Neither can I,” she returned, laughingly.

It was a perfect dinner. For so young a hostess it was marvelously well done. Matthew heard them compliment his wife, saw the elder ladies pet her and the men give her those glances of admiration which she had been used to for years. More than one man told him with unusual enthusiasm of his delightful wife, and it was not the men alone who thought so. And afterwards, as the last motor could be heard speeding away, Fliss turned to her husband.

“I’ve got a lot to do--a lot to learn,” she said, “but I like it.”

“You’re a great success.”

“There’s such big stuff ahead,” she mused. “And I’m going after it, Matthew. It gives me something to do. It’s the sort of thing I can do. There’s a reason for all this society. I’m going to go up to the top and find out the reason.”

“That’s the deepest thing you ever said,” said Matthew, lighting a final cigarette. “It was a great success,” he repeated, and went on to his library to work for a few hours. Fliss sat still, her eyes in the future as they had been long ago on the night of the High School dance. Work, heights, a future--still ahead.