A Novel
by
To My Dear Friend,
Elizabeth Christophers Hobson,
In Gratitude and Affection, I Dedicate This Story.
Constantinople,
October 7, 1884.
Mrs. Sam Wyndham was generally at home after fiveo’clock. The established custom whereby theladies who live in Beacon Street all receive theirfriends on Monday afternoon did not seem to her satisfactory.She was willing to conform to the practice, but shereserved the right of seeing people on other daysas well.
Mrs. Sam Wyndham was never very popular. That is tosay, she was not one of those women who are seeminglynever spoken ill of, and are invited as a matter ofcourse, or rather as an element of success, to everydinner, musical party, and dance in the season.
Women did not all regard her with envy, all youngmen did not think she was capital fun, nor did allold men come and confide to her the weaknesses oftheir approaching second childhood. She was not invariablyquoted as the standard authority on dress, classicalmusic, and Boston literature, and it was not an unpardonableheresy to say that some other women might be, hadbeen, or could be, more amusing in ordinary conversation.Nevertheless, Mrs. Sam Wyndham held a position in Bostonwhich Boston acknowledged, and which Boston insistedthat foreigners such as New Yorkers, Philadelphiansand the like, should acknowledge also in that spiritof reverence which is justly due to a descent on bothsides from several signers of the Declaration of Independence,and to the wife of one of the ruling financial spiritsof the aristocratic part of Boston business.
As a matter of fact, Mrs. Wyndham was about fortyyears of age, as all her friends of course knew; forit is as easy for a Bostonian to conceal a questionof age as for a crowned head. In a place where onehalf of society calls the other half cousin, and wentto school with it, every one knows and accuratelyremembers just how old everybody else is. But Mrs.Wyndham might have passed for younger than she wasamong the world at large, for she was fresh to lookat, and of good figure and complexion. Her black hairshowed no signs of turning gray, and her dark eyeswere bright and penetrating still. There were linesin her face, those microscopic lines that come soabundantly to American women in middle age, speakingof a certain restless nervousness that belongs to themespecially; but on the whole Mrs. Sam Wyndham was fairto see, having a dignity of carriage and a grace ofease about her that at once gave the impression ofa woman thoroughly equal to the part she had to playin the world, and not by any means incapable of enjoyingit.
For the rest, Mrs. Sam led a life very much like thelives of many rich Americans. She went abroad frequently,wandered about the continent with her husband, wentto Egypt and Algiers, stayed in England, where shehad a good many friends, avoided her countrymen andcountrywomen when away from home, and did her dutyin the social state to which she was called in Boston.
She read the books of the period, and generally pronouncedthem ridiculous; she believed in her husband’spolitics, and aristocratically approved the way inwhich he abstained from putting theory into practice,from voting, and in a general way from dirtying hisfingers with anything so corrupt as government, orso despicable a