IV
But Gora, who barely knew of their existence, little recked that she had
been weighed, judged, and condemned. Her old dream had come true. Society,
the society which should have been her birthright and was not, had thrown
open its doors to her at last and everybody was outdoing everybody else in
flattering and entertaining her.
Not that she was deceived for a moment as to the nature of her success with
the majority of the people whose names twinkled so brightly in the social
heavens. She more than suspected the "plot" but cared little for the
original impulse of the book's phenomenal success in San Francisco and
its distinguished faubourgs. She was square with her pride, her youthful
bitterness had its tardy solace, her family name was rescued from
obscurity. She knew that this belated triumph rang hollow, and that she
really cared very little about it; but the strength and tenacity of her
nature alone would have forced her to quaff every drop of the cup so long
withheld. Even if she had been desperately bored she would have accepted
these invitations to houses so long indifferent to her existence, and as a
matter of fact she welcomed the sudden lapse into frivolity after her years
of hard and almost unremitting work. She had played little in her life; and
a year later when she was working eighteen hours a day without rest, in
conditions that seemed to have leapt into life from the blackest pages of
history, she looked back upon her one brief interval of irresponsibility,
gratified vanity, and bodily indolence, as at a bright star low on the
horizon of a dark and terrible night.
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