ONE OF MR.VANDERPOEL'S LETTERS
Mr.Germen, the secretary of the great Mr.Vanderpoel, in arranging the neat stacks of letters preparatory to his chief's entrance to his private room each morning, knowing where each should be placed, understood that such as were addressed in Miss Vanderpoel's hand would be read before anything else.This had been the case even when she had just been placed in a French school, a tall, slim little girl, with immense demanding eyes, and a thick black plait of hair swinging between her straight, rather thin, shoulders.Between other financial potentates and their little girls, Mr.Germen knew that the oddly confidential relation which existed between these two was unusual.Her schoolgirl letters, it had been understood, should be given the first place on the stacks of envelopes each incoming ocean steamer brought in its mail bags.Since the beginning of her visit to her sister, Lady Anstruthers, the exact dates of mail steamers seemed to be of increased importance.Miss Vanderpoel evidently found much to write about.Each steamer brought a full-looking envelope to be placed in a prominent position.
On a hot morning in the early summer Mr.Germen found two or three--two of them of larger size and seeming to contain business papers.These he placed where they would be seen at once.Mr.Vanderpoel was a little later than usual in his arrival.At this season he came from his place in the country, and before leaving it this morning he had been talking to his wife, whom he found rather disturbed by a chance encounter with a young woman who had returned to visit her mother after a year spent in England with her English husband.This young woman, now Lady Bowen, once Milly Jones, had been one of the amusing marvels of New York.
A girl neither rich nor so endowed by nature as to be able to press upon the world any special claim to consideration as a beauty, her enterprise, and the daring of her tactics, had been the delight of many a satiric onlooker.In her school-days she had ingenuously mapped out her future career.Other American girls married men with titles, and she intended to do the same thing.The other little girls laughed, but they liked to hear her talk.All information regarding such unions as was to be found in the newspapers and magazines, she collected and studiously read--sometimes aloud to her companions.
Social paragraphs about royalties, dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, court balls and glittering functions, she devoured and learned by heart.An abominably vulgar little person, she was an interestingly pertinacious creature, and wrought night and day at acquiring an air of fashionable elegance, at first naturally laying it on in such manner as suggested that it should be scraped off with a knife, but with experience gaining a certain specious knowledge of forms.
How the over-mature child at school had assimilated her uncanny young worldliness, it would have been less difficult to decide, if possible sources had been less numerous.The air was full of it, the literature of the day, the chatter of afternoon teas, the gossip of the hour.Before she was fifteen she saw the indiscretion of her childish frankness, and realised that it might easily be detrimental to her ambitions.She said no more of her plans for her future, and even took the astute tone of carelessly treating as a joke her vulgar little past.But no titled foreigner appeared upon the horizon without setting her small, but business-like, brain at work.
Her lack of wealth and assured position made her situation rather hopeless.She was not of the class of lucky young women whose parents' gorgeous establishments offered attractions to wandering persons of rank.She and her mother lived in a flat, and gave rather pathetic afternoon teas in return for such more brilliant hospitalities as careful and pertinacious calling and recalling obliged their acquaintances to feel they could not decently be left wholly out of.Milly and her anxious mother had worked hard.They lost no opportunity of writing a note, or sending a Christmas card, or an economical funeral wreath.By daily toil and the amicable ignoring of casualness of manner or slights, they managed to cling to the edge of the precipice of social oblivion, into whose depths a lesser degree of assiduity, or a greater sensitiveness, would have plunged them.Once--early in Milly's career, when her ever-ready chatter and her superficial brightness were a novelty, it had seemed for a short time that luck might be glancing towards her.A young man of foreign title and of Bohemian tastes met her at a studio dance, and, misled by the smartness of her dress and her always carefully carried air of careless prosperity, began to pay a delusive court to her.For a few weeks all her freshest frocks were worn assiduously and credit was strained to buy new ones.The flat was adorned with fresh flowers and several new yellow and pale blue cushions appeared at the little teas, which began to assume a more festive air.Desirable people, who went ordinarily to the teas at long intervals and through reluctant weakness, or sometimes rebellious amiability, were drummed up and brought firmly to the fore.Milly herself began to look pink and fluffy through mere hopeful good spirits.Her thin little laugh was heard incessantly, and people amusedly if they were good-tempered, derisively if they were spiteful, wondered if it really would come to something.But it did not.The young foreigner suddenly left New York, making his adieus with entire lightness.There was the end of it.He had heard something about lack of income and uncertainty of credit, which had suggested to him that discretion was the better part of valour.He married later a young lady in the West, whose father was a solid person.
