Mrs. Groome might be compelled therefore to look at new people in the homes
of her friends--even her proud daughter, Mrs. Abbott, had unaccountably
surrendered to the meretricious glitter of Burlingame--but she would not
meet them, she would not permit Alexina to cross their thresholds, nor
should the best of them ever cross her own.
Poor Alexina, forced to submit, her mother placidly impervious to coaxings,
tears, and storms, had finally compromised the matter to the satisfaction
of herself and of her own close chosen friend, Aileen Lawton. She
accompanied her mother with outward resignation to small dinner dances and
to the Matriarch balls, presided over by the newly elected social leader,
a lady of unimpeachable Southern ancestry and indifference to wealth,
who pledged her Virginia honor to Mrs. Groome that Alexina should not be
introduced to any young man whose name was not on her own visiting list;
and, while her mother slept, the last of the Ballinger-Groomes accompanied
Aileen (chaperoned by an unprincipled aunt, who was an ancient enemy of
Maria Groome) to parties quite as respectable but infinitely gayer, and
indubitably mixed.
She was quite safe, for Mrs. Groome, when free of social duties, retired on
the stroke of nine with a novel, and turned off the gas at ten. She never
read the society columns of the newspapers, choked as they were with
unfamiliar and plebeian names; and her friends, regarding Alexina's gay
disobedience as a palatable joke on "poor old Maria," and sympathetic with
youth, would have been the last to enlighten her.
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