een his giving the falsest
impression. In what way that was to be for an instant considered had
their common past committed him to crapy Cornelia? He repudiated with a
whack on the gravel any ghost of an obligation.

What he could get rid of with scanter success, unfortunately, was the
peculiar sharpness of his sense that, though mystified by his visible
flurry--and yet not mystified enough for a sympathetic question
either--his hostess had been, on the whole, even more frankly diverted:
which was precisely an example of that newest, freshest, finest freedom
in her, the air and the candour of assuming, not "heartlessly," not
viciously, not even very consciously, but with a bright pampered
confidence which would probably end by affecting one's nerves as the
most impertinent stroke in the world, that every blest thing coming up
for her in any connection was somehow matter for her general recreation.
There she was again with the innocent egotism, the gilded and
overflowing anarchism, really, of her doubtless quite unwitting but none
the less rabid modern note. Her grace of ease was perfect, but it was
all grace of ease, not a single shred of it grace of uncertainty or
of difficulty--which meant, when you came to see, that, for its happy
working, not a grain of provision was left by it to mere manners. This
was clearly going to be the music of the future--that if people were but
rich enough and furnished enough and fed enough, exercised and sanitated
and manicured and generally advised and advertised and made "knowing"
enough, _avertis_ enough, as the term appeared to be nowadays in Paris,
all they had to do for civility was to take the amused ironic view of
those who might be less initiated. In _his_ time, when he was young or
even when he was only but a little less middle-aged, the best manners
had been the best kindness, and the best kindness had mostly been some
art of not insisting on one's luxurious differences, of concealing
rather, for common humanity, if not for common decency, a part at least
of the intensity or the ferocity with which one might be "in the know."

Oh, the "know"--Mrs. Worthingham was in it, all instinctively,
inevitably, and as a matter of course, up to her eyes; which didn't,
however, the least little bit prevent her being as ignorant as a fish of
everything that really and intimately and fundamentally concerned _him_,
poor dear old White-Mason. She didn't, in the first place, so much as
know wh