Chapter 7 Dinner at the Aldermere

The Aldermere Club stood on the avenue like a fortress built to keep out every century but its own, and on the first Saturday of December it held its winter dinner for the families whose money had built the block around it. Cornelia had been coming to the Aldermere since she was a girl in a white dress, carrying a glass of punch for her father in careful hands, and she had learned early that a room full of people who have known you all your life is the hardest room in the world to be honest in. Her aunt Hortense had chosen her gown and had not needed to threaten twice. *You will come, Cornelia, and you will be charming, and you will not mention that dreadful newspaper business to anyone. There are men at this dinner whose accounts your father's paper depended upon, and one of them, I have it on excellent authority, has expressed a wish to make your acquaintance.* That man sat to her right, and his name was Mr. Sterling, and he was fifty years old and worth six million dollars and had buried one wife and had been, so far as Cornelia could tell from a dinner's conversation about railways and horses, entirely without opinions. "You are lately from Europe, I hear," Sterling said. "How did you find the Continent?" "Long," Cornelia said. "And full of people explaining things to me." Sterling laughed, because he laughed at everything, whether it was funny or not, and she looked past him down the table to the door, where Selwyn of the Morning Bugle had just come in with two of the alderman's men, and had caught her eye, and had bowed to her with a small smile that made her want to throw the candelabra at his head. She was still looking when her neighbor on the other side leaned close. This was Rowena Ballard, who had been her friend since the schoolroom, and who had refused to be her friend in public for the last three weeks because of what the Bugle had printed about her. "You are staring at him," Rowena murmured. "I am considering him." "Cornelia. Do not. Whatever you are planning to print, do not print it at a dinner where my mother is watching you." "I cannot make you any promises in front of your mother," Cornelia said, and Rowena put her napkin over her mouth to hide a laugh, and for a moment the two of them were again the girls who had hidden in this very cloakroom with stolen cakes. Then Sterling cleared his throat at her other side, and the moment closed. "Miss Hollingsworth," he said. "I have heard — and I hope you will forgive me for saying so — that you are considering declining Mr. Thorndike's offer for the Clarion." "Your information is good." "It is my own information. Mr. Thorndike is my banker also." Sterling leaned a little closer, and his voice dropped to the tone of a man who believes he is being kind. "I do not pretend to know your affairs. But I do know this city, and I know what it does to a woman alone who sets herself against its arrangements. It is not a war you can win by being brave. It is a war you can only win by being married to someone who will stand in front of you." "And you are offering to stand in front of me." "I am offering you the offer, Miss Hollingsworth. With the paper or without it. There are men who would want the paper. I do not. I have mines and I have a railway and I have no desire whatever to take up a newspaper. What I have is a name that will stop a man like Thorndike at the door, and a fortune that will let you keep the press-room and pension the men and print whatever you please for the rest of your life." Cornelia looked down at her plate. For one long, honest moment she considered it. It would be so easy. She had been raised to be exactly this: a gracious woman with a rich man beside her, a name on a deed, a life removed from the smell of ink and the sound of the presses. "I thank you for the offer," she said, "and I refuse it." Sterling's face did not change, but something behind it closed like a door. "Might I ask why?" "Because I have been given a thing to do," she said, "and I have discovered that I am the only person in this room who wants to do it." She said it quietly, and Sterling heard the words and not the meaning, and answered with a small bow and a compliment about her gown, and for the rest of the dinner he was attentive and easy, as though nothing at all had been refused. That was the part she had not expected: that a refusal offered in a dining room could be received as a pleasantry, folded away with the fish course, so that the offer might be made again another evening and be called, then, a kindness. Selwyn did not let it pass so easily. When the coffee came he made his way down the table and stood behind Sterling's chair with his cup, and said, in the tone of a man sharing a confidence with the whole room, "Miss Hollingsworth. I read your father's paper this morning. Very brave, the things you have been printing. Very brave, and very expensive." "It is not brave to print the truth," Cornelia said. "It is only expensive when no one else will." "Well." Selwyn smiled and lifted his cup. "You will find that men are brave about other people's money more often than about their own." He drank and moved on, and left the sentence in the air the way he left everything, for somebody else to carry. Cornelia looked at her plate and did not answer, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Rowena's hand tighten on her napkin, and understood that her friend had understood. Across the table, two of the alderman's men were watching her with the flat, patient interest of men who wait to see which way the wind will blow before they say anything at all." --- The storm broke, as she had known it would, in the carriage going home. "Are you mad?" Hortense said. "Six million dollars and no conditions and you sit there as though he were selling you a horse with bad knees. Your father left you a bankrupt paper and a scandal and your mother's name, and you mean to throw away the one man in the city who could save you from both." "He did not offer to save me from both. He offered to buy me out of the fight." "The fight is not yours, Cornelia. It never was. The fight belongs to men who have mismanaged their money and now wish to take yours, and to that — that *printer* who writes letters signed with his fist. Your father's fight, if you must call it a fight, was to build something and to leave it to his daughter. Not to burn it down in December to make a point about widows' savings." The carriage turned into the square, and the house with its cold windows came into view, and Cornelia looked at it and understood, with a clarity that hurt, that she was about to lose her aunt as surely as she had lost her father. "I have arranged for the bank to open my father's box on Monday," she said quietly. "I have asked Mr. Kavanagh to be present." Hortense went white. "You will not do this," she said. "You will not parade your father's shame with a labor agitator at your elbow and call it honor. If you do it, do not expect me to remain in this house." "I am sorry, Aunt Hortense," Cornelia said. "I have already decided." The carriage stopped. Hortense climbed down without waiting for the footman, and went up the steps and into the house, and did not once look back, and Cornelia sat alone in the dark carriage for a long time before she followed her in. ---