Seeing her pensive, Carli swung himself back to the keyboard again, pounding out a few bars of the dance music in Strauss' _Salome_, of which the score lay open before him. He was a good-looking young man of twenty-two, of whom any mother, not too exacting, might be proud. Very blond--with well-chiselled features and waving hair--not so tall as to make his excessive slimness seem disproportionate--there was something in the perfection with which he was "turned out" that gave him the air of a "creation." Mrs. Wappinger's joy in him was the more satisfying because of the fact that, relative to herself, he was in the line of progress. He was the blossom of culture, travel, and sport, borne by her own strenuous generation of successful material effort. To the things to which he had attained she felt that in a certain sense she had attained herself, on the principle of _facit per alium, facit per se._ In the social position she had reached it was a pleasure to know that Harvard, Europe, and money had given Carli a refinement that made up in some measure for her own deficiencies.
"Well, what are you going to do about it?" he asked, breaking off in the midst of the cruel ecstasy of the daughter of Herodias, and swinging himself back, so as to confront her.
"I'm going to give a little tea," Mrs. Wappinger answered, with decision; "a _tay antime,_ as the French say. I shall have these two Eveleths--or whatever their name is--Lucilla van Tromp, and Derek and Dorothea Pruyn."
"You may accomplish the first and the last. You'll find it difficult to fill in the middle. To say nothing of the old girl, Derek Pruyn is too busy for teas--_intime_, or otherwise."
"I'm going to have him," she stated, with energy.
"You go round and tell Dorothea she's got to bring him--she's just got to, that's all. He'll come--I know he will. There are forces at work here that you and I don't see, and if something doesn't happen, my name isn't Clara Wappinger."
With this mysterious saying she rose, to leave Carli to his music.
"Nobody knows James van Tromp better than I do," she declared, with pride, turning on the threshold, "and he doesn't write that way unless he has a plan in mind. You tell Dorothea what I say. Let me see! To-day is Tuesday; the _Picardie_ will get in on Saturday; you'll see Dorothea on Sunday; and we'll have the tea on Thursday next."