She took sharp note of that.
Subsequently the Haggertys failed to include her, as they had always done before, in their generous summer invitations.
This was true also of the Lanman Zeiglers and the Lucas Demmigs. No direct affront was offered; she was simply no longer invited.
Also one morning she read in the Tribune that Mrs. Corscaden Batjer had sailed for Italy.
No word of this had been sent to Berenice. Yet Mrs. Batjer was supposedly one of her best friends. A hint to some is of more avail than an open statement to others. Berenice knew quite well in which direction the tide was setting.
True, there were a number—the ultra-smart of the smart world—who protested.
Mrs. Patrick Gilbennin, for instance:
“No!
You don’t tell me?
What a shame!
Well, I like Bevy and shall always like her.
She’s clever, and she can come here just as long as she chooses.
It isn’t her fault.
She’s a lady at heart and always will be.
Life is so cruel.”
Mrs. Augustus Tabreez:
“Is that really true?
I can’t believe it.
Just the same, she’s too charming to be dropped.
I for one propose to ignore these rumors just as long as I dare.
She can come here if she can’t go anywhere else.”
Mrs. Pennington Drury:
“That of Bevy Fleming!
Who says so?
I don’t believe it.
I like her anyhow.
The idea of the Haggertys cutting her—dull fools!
Well, she can be my guest, the dear thing, as long as she pleases.
As though her mother’s career really affected her!”
Nevertheless, in the world of the dull rich—those who hold their own by might of possession, conformity, owl-eyed sobriety, and ignorance—Bevy Fleming had become persona non grata.
How did she take all this?
With that air of superior consciousness which knows that no shift of outer material ill-fortune can detract one jot from an inward mental superiority.
The truly individual know themselves from the beginning and rarely, if ever, doubt.
Life may play fast and loose about them, running like a racing, destructive tide in and out, but they themselves are like a rock, still, serene, unmoved.
Bevy Fleming felt herself to be so immensely superior to anything of which she was a part that she could afford to hold her head high even now.
Just the same, in order to remedy the situation she now looked about her with an eye single to a possible satisfactory marriage.
Braxmar had gone for good.
He was somewhere in the East—in China, she heard—his infatuation for her apparently dead.
Kilmer Duelma was gone also—snapped up—an acquisition on the part of one of those families who did not now receive her.
However, in the drawing-rooms where she still appeared—and what were they but marriage markets?—one or two affairs did spring up—tentative approachments on the part of scions of wealth.
They were destined to prove abortive.
One of these youths, Pedro Ricer Marcado, a Brazilian, educated at Oxford, promised much for sincerity and feeling until he learned that Berenice was poor in her own right—and what else? Some one had whispered something in his ear.
Again there was a certain William Drake Bowdoin, the son of a famous old family, who lived on the north side of Washington Square.
After a ball, a morning musicale, and one other affair at which they met Bowdoin took Berenice to see his mother and sister, who were charmed.
“Oh, you serene divinity!” he said to her, ecstatically, one day.
“Won’t you marry me?”
Bevy looked at him and wondered.
“Let us wait just a little longer, my dear,” she counseled.
“I want you to be sure that you really love me.”
Shortly thereafter, meeting an old classmate at a club, Bowdoin was greeted as follows: