Frothingham had called her “Miss Hooper.” This gave her the opening. “Miss Hooper!” she said with her jauntiest air. “That’s ancient history. I ain’t been called that for ages and ages. Why, I’m an old married woman--for Chicago.”
“Really,” said he, thinking it “some stupid, silly sell or other.” He was hardly listening. He was more interested in the rope of pearls and diamonds that swung from her neck to far below her waist. The pearls were large and were once perfect; but each pearl had been mutilated by having a diamond set in it--a very nightmare of sacrifice of beauty and taste in an effort to make more expensive the most expensive.
“Yes, indeed--truly. I’m Mrs.----” She stopped short and gave him a look of horror.
“Dear me!” exclaimed Frothingham with satiric sympathy. “Have you forgotten his name, or did you forget to ask it?”
“No--but I never _thought_ of it before--thought how it sounds. My, but it’s awful! I’d never in the world have married him if I’d have pronounced it beforehand. Mrs. _Burster_! Ain’t that horrible?” Frothingham had lifted “ain’t” from the slough of doubtful grammar to the pinnacle of fashion in fashionable Chicago.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he drawled, still imagining she was jesting. “It might be worse, mightn’t it, now?”
At this seeming impertinence her eyes flashed. “Yes--it might. It might be Bursted--or ‘Busted’--mightn’t it?” Then, seeing that her “shot” at his financial condition as described in the newspaper she had read and believed apparently did not touch him, she relented and was in a good humour again. “I’ve been engaged to Tom for a year or so on and off,” she went on. “When I woke up this morning it came into my head to marry him. And I did it while your lawyer and papa were squabbling.” She said this so convincingly that she herself began to feel that it was “as good as true.”
The news that she and Frothingham were advancing together preceded them to the ballroom, but had not spread far enough from its doors to impair the sensation made by their entrance with every appearance of friendliness. And the much discussed mystery of that day’s doings is here solved for the first time.
The next afternoon Frothingham and Wickham drove up to Barney’s door as Nelly and Worthington were arriving on foot. One glance at their faces and he knew that they understood each the other now. “All I accomplished,” he said to himself mournfully, “was to force the fellow to play his hand. What ripping luck I do bring--other people!” He paused only long enough to make his passing on seem natural. Presently she followed him to the library, where he was standing on the rug before the closed fireplace with a cigarette drooping dejectedly from the corner of his mouth. She moved restlessly about the room, evidently seeking a way to begin telling him something.