If Miss Clergy and Thurley were mysteries to the hotel guests and attendants, so were the guests and attendants mysteries untold to Thurley and Miss Clergy. To be placed suddenly in New York with unlimited leeway in opportunities and money, cut off from every simple, human tie which heretofore had impressed itself on one’s emotional heart and be put to work at such a multitude of things that one could hardly remember which hour was designated for this and which for that—to say the very least, it was “tizzy,” as Hobart obligingly expressed it for Thurley during one of their lessons.
No less “tizzy” was it for Miss Clergy to waken from a selfish lethargy, with revenge the stimulating impulse; to try, all in an instant, to find her way back to the proper method of living combined with modern requirements and readjustments; to become accustomed to strange noises, vehicles, buildings, all manner of new and bewildering novelties which every one else, save her wild-rose Thurley, accepted as commonplace; to refrain from telling every one who talked with her the reason she had taken this homeless country girl to New York and was prepared to spend a fortune to make her a success.
The modistes and milliners used to gossip about it, after they had been in Miss Clergy’s rooms to take measurements and orders. So did the bootmaker Hobart had sent up, and the riding master and the language teacher and the social secretary, who somehow slipped into her place and became one of them. A veritable monument to fashion and smartness she was, with the way of making one sit up straight when one was least expecting the command, of smoothing out personal pronouns to the ease of every one concerned, who found time every day to make Thurley practise entering and leaving a room, bowing, shaking hands, smiling, laughing, holding her head just so, who had stacks of hateful cards and sheets of paper on which Thurley must write invitations to imaginary dinners and affairs and then reply to the invitations, who told one that the easiest way to carry on a conversation was to be an excellent listener, and yet, all in the same breath, made one memorize certain smart phrases or witty bon mots, historical dates of importance, soothing sentences which would fit in for the weather, a clay pigeon match or the assassination of the president—all these things and more did the social secretary achieve, Thurley groaning inwardly as the hour approached for her arrival.