“Isn’t she beautiful! And—and—there is something so sweet, so—so good about her!”
Even as her mind framed its spontaneous tribute to the girlish apparition with the elflike head, Mrs. Jack knew that it was not true. No; Amy Carleton was many things, but no one could call her good. In fact, if she was not “a notorious woman”, the reason was that she had surpassed the ultimate limits of notoriety, even for New York. Everybody knew her, and knew all about her, yet what the truth was, or what the true image of that lovely counterfeit of youth and joy, no one could say.
Chronology? Well, for birth she had had the golden spoon. She had been born to enfabled wealth. Hers had been the childhood of a dollar princess, kept, costly, cabined, pruned, confined. A daughter of “Society”, her girlhood had been spent in rich schools and in travel, in Europe, Southampton, New York, and Palm Beach. By eighteen she was “out”—a famous beauty. By nineteen she was married. And by twenty she was divorced, her name tainted. It had been a sensational case which fairly reeked. Even at that time her conduct had been so scandalous that her husband had had no difficulty in winning a decree.
Since that time, seven years before, her career had defied the measurements of chronology. Although she was now only in her middle twenties, her life seemed to go back through aeons of iniquity. Thus one might remember one of the innumerable scandals that had been connected with her name, and then check oneself suddenly with a feeling of stunned disbelief. “Oh, no! It can’t be! That happened only three short years ago, and since then she’s—why she’s—” And one would stare in stupefaction at that elflike head, that snub nose, that boyishly eager face, like one who realised that he was looking at the dread Medusa, or at some enchantress of Circean cunning whose life was older than the ages and whose heart was old as hell.
It baffled time, it turned reality to phantasmal shapes. One could behold her as she was to-night, here in New York, this freckled, laughing image of happy innocence—and before ten days had made their round one might come upon her again in the corruptest gatherings of Paris, drugged fathoms deep in opium, foul-bodied and filth-bespattered, cloying in the embraces of a gutter rat, so deeply rooted in the cesspool that it seemed she must have been bred on sewage and had never known any other life.
Since her first marriage and divorce, she had been married twice again. The second marriage had lasted only twenty hours, and had been annulled. The third had ended when her husband shot himself.
And before and after that, and in between, and in and out, and during it and later on, and now and then, and here and there, and at home and abroad, and on the seven seas, and across the length and breadth of the five continents, and yesterday and to-morrow and for ever—could it be said of her that she had been promiscuous? No, that could not be said of her. For she had been as free as air, and one does not qualify the general atmosphere with such a paltry adjective as “promiscuous”. She had just slept with everybody—with white, black, yellow, pink, green, or purple—but she had never been promiscuous.
It was, in romantic letters, a period that celebrated the lady who was lost, the lovely creature in the green hat who was “never let off anything”. Her story was a familiar one: she was the ill-starred heroine of fate, a martyr to calamitous mischance, whose ruin had been brought about through tragic circumstances which she could not control, and for which she was not responsible.
Amy Carleton had her apologists who tried to cast her in this role. The stories told about her “start upon the downward path” were numerous. One touching version dated the beginning of the end from the time when, an innocent and fun-loving girl of eighteen, she had, in a moment of daring, lighted a cigarette at a dinner party in Southampton, attended by a large number of eminent dowagers. The girl’s downfall, according to this tale, had been brought about by this thoughtless and harmless little act. From that moment on—so the story went—the verdict of the dowagers was “thumbs down” on Amy. The evil tongues began to wag, scandal began to grow, her reputation was torn to shreds. Then, in desperation, the unhappy child did go astray: she took to drink, from drink to lovers, from lovers to opium, from opium to—everything.