The Price She Paid | Page 5

Gower to find a fitting husband. As has been hinted, Hanging Rock was one of those upper-middle-class colonies where splurge and social ambition dominate the community life. In such colonies the young men are of two classes--those beneath such a girl as Mildred, and those who had the looks, the manners, the intelligence, and the prospects to justify them in looking higher socially--in looking among the very rich and really fashionable. In the Hanging Rock sort of community, having all the snobbishness of Fifth Avenue, Back Bay, and Rittenhouse Square, with the added torment of the snobbishness being perpetually ungratified--in such communities, beneath a surface reeking culture and idealistic folderol, there is a coarse and brutal materialism, a passion for money, for luxury, for display, that equals aristocratic societies at their worst. No one can live for a winter, much less grow up, in such a place without becoming saturated with sycophantry. Thus, only by some impossible combination of chances could there have been at Hanging Rock a young man who would have appreciated Mildred and have had the courage of his appreciation. This combination did not happen. In Mildred's generation and set there were only the two classes of men noted above. The men of the one of them which could not have attracted her accepted their fate of mating with second-choice females to whom they were themselves second choice. The men of the other class rarely appeared at Hanging Rock functions, hung about the rich people in New York, Newport, and on Long Island, and would as soon have thought of taking a Hanging Rock society girl to wife as of exchanging hundred-dollar bills for twenty-five-cent pieces. Having attractions acceptable in the best markets, they took them there. Hanging Rock denounced them as snobs, for Hanging Rock was virtuously eloquent on the subject of snobbishness--we human creatures being never so effective as when assailing in others the vice or weakness we know from lifelong, intimate, internal association with it. But secretly the successfully ambitious spurners of that suburban society were approved, were envied. And Hanging Rock was most gracious to them whenever it got the chance.
In her five years of social life Mildred had gone only with the various classes of fashionable people, had therefore known only the men who are full of the poison of snobbishness. She had been born and bred in an environment as impregnated with that poison as the air of a kitchen-garden with onions. She knew nothing else. The secret intention to refuse Stanley Baird, should he propose, was therefore the more astonishing--and the more significant. From time to time in any given environment you will find some isolated person, some personality, with a trait wholly foreign and out of place there. Now it is a soft voice and courteous manners in a slum; again it is a longing for a life of freedom and equality in a member of a royal family that has known nothing but sordid slavery for centuries. Or, in the petty conventionality of a prosperous middle- or upper-class community you come upon one who dreams--perhaps vaguely but still longingly--of an existence where love and ideas shall elevate and glorify life. In spite of her training, in spite of the teaching and example of all about her from the moment of her opening her eyes upon the world, Mildred Gower at twenty-three still retained something of these dream flowers sown in the soil of her naturally good mind by some book or play or perhaps by some casually read and soon forgotten article in magazine or newspaper. We have the habit of thinking only weeds produce seeds that penetrate and prosper everywhere and anywhere. The truth is that fine plants of all kinds, vegetable, fruit, and flower of rarest color and perfume, have this same hardiness and fecundity. Pull away at the weeds in your garden for a while, and see if this is not so. Though you may plant nothing, you will be amazed at the results if you but clear a little space of its weeds--which you have been planting and cultivating.
Mildred--woman fashion--regarded it as a reproach upon her that she had not yet succeeded in making the marriage everyone, including herself, predicted for her and expected of her. On the contrary, it was the most savage indictment possible of the marriageable and marrying men who had met her--of their stupidity, of their short-sighted and mean-souled calculation, of their lack of courage--the courage to take what they, as men of flesh and blood wanted, instead of what their snobbishness ordered. And if Stanley Baird, the nearest to a flesh-and-blood man of any who had known her, had not been so profoundly afraid of his fashionable mother and of his sister, the Countess of Waring-- But he was