Even Sir Donald,
who was next to her, and who once--in the most definite moment of Miss
Schley's ingenious travesty--looked at her for an instant, could not
discern that she was aware of what was amusing or enraging all her
acquaintances.
Naturally she had grasped the situation at once, had discovered at once
why Miss Schley was anxious for her to be there. As she sat in the box
looking on at this gross impertinence, she seemed to herself to be
watching herself after a long /degringolade/, which had brought her, not
to the gutter, but to the smart restaurant, the smart music-hall, the
smart night club; the smart everything else that is beyond the borderland
of even a lax society. This was Miss Schley's comment upon her. The sting
of it lay in this fact, that it followed immediately upon the heels of
the unpleasant scene at Arkell House. Otherwise, she thought it would not
have troubled her. Now it did trouble her. She felt not only indignant
with Miss Schley. She felt also secretly distressed in a more subtle way.
Miss Schley's performance was calculated, coming at this moment, to make
her world doubtful just when it had been turned from doubt. A good
caricature fixes the attention upon the oddities, or the absurdities,
latent in the original. But this caricature did more. It suggested hidden
possibilities which she, by her own indiscreet action at the ball, had
made perhaps to seem probabilities to many people.
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