It was a great dress parade of society women. One who wished to play
a proper part in it would spend at least ten thousand dollars upon
her costumes for the week. It was necessary to have a different gown
for the afternoon and evening of each day; and some, who were adepts
at quick changes and were proud of it, would wear three or four a
day, and so need a couple of dozen gowns for the show. And of course
there had to be hats and shoes and gloves to match. There would be
robes of priceless fur hung carelessly over the balcony to make a
setting; and in the evening there would be pyrotechnical displays of
jewels. Mrs. Virginia Landis wore a pair of simple pearl earrings,
which she told the reporters had cost twenty thousand dollars; and
there were two women who displayed four hundred thousand dollars'
worth of diamonds--and each of them had hired a detective to hover
about in the crowd and keep watch over her!

Nor must one suppose, because the horse was an inconspicuous part of
the show, that he was therefore an inexpensive part. One man was to
be seen here driving a four-in-hand of black stallions which had
cost forty thousand; there were other men who drove only one horse,
and had paid forty thousand for that. Half a million was a moderate
estimate of the cost of the "string" which some would exhibit. And
of course these horses were useless, save for show purposes, and to
breed other horses like them. Many of them never went out of their
stables except for exercise upon a track; and the cumbrous and
enormous; expensive coaches were never by any possibility used
elsewhere--when they were taken from place to place they seldom went
upon their own wheels.

And there were people here who made their chief occupation in life
the winning of blue ribbons at these shows. They kept great country
estates especially for the horses, and had private indoor exhibition
rings. Robbie Walling and Chauncey Venable were both such people; in
the summer of next year another of the Wallings took a string across
the water to teach the horse-show game to Society in London. He took
twenty or thirty horses, under the charge of an expert manager and a
dozen assistants; he sent sixteen different kinds of carriages, and
two great coaches, and a ton of harness and other stuff. It required
one whole deck of a steamer, and the expedition enabled him to get
rid of six hundred thousand dollars.

All through the day, of course, Robbie was down in the ring with his
trainers and his competitors, and Montague sat and kept his wife
company. There was a steady stream of visitors, who came to
congratulate her upon their successes, and to commiserate with Mrs.
Chauncey Venable over the sufferings of the un-happy victim of a
notoriety-seeking district attorney.

There was just one drawback to the Horse Show, as Montague gathered
from the conversation that went on among the callers: it was public,
and there was no way to prevent undesirable people from taking part.
There were, it appeared, hordes of rich people in New York who were
not in Society, and of whose existence Society was haughtily
unaware; but these people might enter horses and win prizes, and
even rent a box and exhibit their clothes. And they might induce the
reporters to mention them--and of course the ignorant populace did
not know the difference, and stared at them just as hard as at Mrs.
Robbie or Mrs. Winnie. And so for a whole blissful week these people
had all the sensations of being in Society! "It won't be very long
before that will kill the Horse Show," said Mrs. Vivie Patton, with
a snap of her black eyes.

There was Miss Yvette Simpkins, for instance; Society frothed at the
mouth when her name was mentioned. Miss Yvette was the niece of a
stock-broker who was wealthy, and she thought that she was in
Society, and the foolish public thought so, too. Miss Yvette made a
speciality of newspaper publicity; you were always seeing her
picture, with some new "Worth creation," and the picture would be
labelled "Miss Yvette Simpkins, the best-dressed woman in New York,"
or "Miss Yvette Simpkins, who is known as the best woman whip in
Society." It was said that Miss Yvette, who was short and stout, and
had a rosy German face, had paid five thousand dollars at one clip
for photographs of herself in a new wardrobe; and her pictures were
sent to the newspapers in bundles of a dozen at a time. Miss Yvette
possessed over a million dollars' worth of diamonds--the finest in
the country, according to the newspapers; she had spent a hundred
and twenty-six thousand dollars this year upon her clothes, and she
gave long interviews, in which she set forth the fact that a woman
nowadays could not really be well dressed upon less than a hundred
thousand a year. It was Miss Yvette's boast that she had never
ridden in a street-car in her life.

Montague always had a soft spot in his heart for the unfortunate
Miss Yvette, who laboured so hard to be a guiding light; for it
chanced to be while she was in the ring, exhibiting her skill in
driving tandem, that he met with a fateful encounter. Afterward,
when he came to look back upon these early days, it seemed strange
to him that he should have gone about this place, so careless and
unsuspecting, while the fates were weaving strange destinies about
him.

It was on Tuesday afternoon, and he sat in the box of Mrs. Venable,
a sister-in-law of the Major. The Major, who was a care-free
bachelor, was there himself, and also Betty Wyman, who was making
sprightly comments on the passers-by; and there strolled into the
box Chappie de Peyster, accompanied by a young lady.

So many people had stopped and been introduced and then passed on,
that Montague merely glanced at her once. He noticed that she was
tall and graceful, and caught her name, Miss Hegan.

The turnouts in the ring consisted of one horse harnessed in front
of another; and Montague was wondering what conceivable motive could
induce a human being to hitch and drive horses in that fashion. The
conversation turned upon Miss Yvette, who was in the ring; and Betty
remarked upon the airy grace with which she wielded the long whip
she carried. "Did you see what the paper said about her this
morning?" she asked. "' Miss Simpkins was exquisitely clad in purple
velvet,' and so on! She looked for all the world like the Venus at
the Hippodrome!"

"Why isn't she in Society?" asked Montague, curiously.

"She!" exclaimed Betty. "Why, she's a travesty!"

There was a moment's pause, preceding a remark by their young lady
visitor. "I've an idea," said she, "that the real reason she never
got into Society was that she was fond of her old father."

And Montague gave a short glance at the speaker, who was gazing
fixedly into the ring. He heard the Major chuckle, and he thought
that he heard Betty Wyman give a little sniff. A few moments later
the young lady arose, and with some remark to Mrs. Venable about how
well her costume became her, she passed on out of the box.

"Who is that?" asked Montague.

"That," the Major answered, "that's Laura Hegan--Jim Hegan's
daughter."

"Oh!" said Montague, and caught his breath. Jim Hegan--Napoleon of
finance--czar of a gigantic system of railroads, and the power
behind the political thrones of many states.

"His only daughter, too," the Major added. "Gad, what a juicy morsel
for somebody!"

"Well, she'll make him pay for all he gets, whoever he is!" retorted
Betty, vindictively.

"You don't like her?" inquired Montague; and Betty replied promptly,
"I do not!"

"Her daddy and Betty's granddaddy are always at swords' points," put
in Major Venable.

"I have nothing to do with my granddaddy's quarrels," said the young
lady. "I have troubles enough of my own."

"What is the matter with Miss Hegan?" asked Montague, laughing.

"She's an idea she's too good for the world she lives in," said
Betty. "When you're with her, you feel as you will before the
judgment throne."

"Undoubtedly a disturbing feeling," put in the Major.

"She never hands you anything but you find a pin hidden in it," went
on the girl. "All her remarks are meant to be read backward, and my
life is too short to straighten out their kinks. I like a person to
say what they mean in plain English, and then I can either like them
or not."

"Mostly not," said the Major, grimly; and added, "Anyway, she's
beautiful."

"Perhaps," said the other. "So is the Jungfrau; but I prefer
something more comfortable."

"What's Chappie de Peyster beauing her around for?" asked Mrs.
Venable. "Is he a candidate?"

"Maybe his debts are troubling him again," said Mistress Betty. "He
must be in a desperate plight.--Did you hear how Jack Audubon
proposed to her?"

"Did Jack propose?" exclaimed the Major.

"Of course he did," said the girl. "His brother told me." Then, for
Montague's benefit, she explained, "Jack Audubon is the Major's
nephew, and he's a bookworm, and spends all his time collecting
scarabs."

"What did he say to her?" asked the Major, highly amused.

"Why," said Betty, "he told her he knew she didn't love him; but
also she knew that he didn't care anything about her money, and she
might like to marry him so that other men would let her alone."

"Gad!" cried the old gentleman, slapping his knee. "A masterpiece!"

"Does she have so many suitors?" asked Montague; and the Major
replied, "My dear boy--she'll have a hundred million dollars some
day!"

At this point Oliver put in appearance, and Betty got up and went
for a stroll with him; then Montague asked for light upon Miss
Hegan's remark.

"What she said is perfectly true," replied the Major; "only it riled
Betty. There's many a gallant dame cruising the social seas who has
stowed her old relatives out of sight in the hold."

"What's the matter with old Simpkins?" asked tho other.

"Just a queer boy," was the reply. "He has a big pile, and his one
joy in life is the divine Yvette. It is really he who makes her
ridiculous--he has a regular press agent for her, a chap he loads up
with jewellery and cheques whenever he gets her picture into the
papers."

The Major paused a moment to greet some acquaintance, and then
resumed the conversation. Apparently he could gossip in this
intimate fashion about any person whom you named. Old Simpkins had
been very poor as a boy, it appeared, and he had never got over the
memory of it. Miss Yvette spent fifty thousand at a clip for Paris
gowns; but every day her old uncle would save up the lumps of sugar
which came with the expensive lunch he had brought to his office.
And when he had several pounds he would send them home by messenger!

This conversation gave Montague a new sense of the complicatedness
of the world into which he had come. Miss Simpkins was "impossible";
and yet there was--for instance--that Mrs. Landis whom he had met
at Mrs. Winnie Duval's. He had mot her several times at the show;
and he heard the Major and his sister-in-law chuckling over a
paragraph in the society journal, to the effect that Mrs. Virginia
van Rensselaer Landis had just returned from a successful
hunting-trip in the far West. He did not see the humour of this, at
least not until they had told him of another paragraph which had
appeared some time before: stating that Mrs. Landis had gone to
acquire residence in South Dakota, taking with her thirty-five
trunks and a poodle; and that "Leanie" Hopkins, the handsome young
stock-broker, had taken a six months' vow of poverty, chastity, and
obedience.

And yet Mrs. Landis was "in" Society! And moreover, she spent nearly
as much upon her clothes as Miss Yvette, and the clothes were quite
as conspicuous; and if the papers did not print pages about them, it
was not because Mrs. Landis was not perfectly willing. She was
painted and made up quite as frankly as any chorus-girl on the
stage. She laughed a great deal, and in a high key, and she and her
friends told stories which made Montague wish to move out of the
way.

Mrs. Landis had for some reason taken a fancy to Alice, and invited
her home to lunch with her twice during the show. And after they had
got home in the evening, the girl sat upon the bed in her
fur-trimmed wrapper, and told Montague and his mother and Mammy Lucy
all about her visit.

"I don't believe that woman has a thing to do or to think about in
the world except to wear clothes!" she said. "Why, she has
adjustable mirrors on ball-bearings, so that she can see every part
of her skirts! And she gets all her gowns from Paris, four times a
year--she says there are four seasons now, instead of two! I thought
that my new clothes amounted to something, but my goodness, when I
saw hers!"

Then Alice went on to describe the unpacking of fourteen trunks,
which had just come up from the custom-house that day. Mrs.
Virginia's couturiere had her photograph and her colouring
(represented in actual paints) and a figure made up from exact
measurements; and so every one of the garments would fit her
perfectly. Each one came stuffed with tissue paper and held in place
by a lattice-work of tape; and attached to each gown was a piece of
the fabric, from which her shoemaker would make shoes or slippers.
There were street-costumes and opera-wraps, robes de chambre and
tea-gowns, reception-dresses, and wonderful ball and dinner gowns.
Most of these latter were to be embroidered with jewellery before
they were worn, and imitation jewels were sewn on, to show how the
real ones were to be placed. These garments were made of real lace
or Parisian embroidery, and the prices paid for them were almost
impossible to credit. Some of them were made of lace so filmy that
the women who made them had to sit in damp cellars, because the
sunlight would dry the fine threads and they would break; a single
yard of the lace represented forty days of labour. There was a
pastel "batiste de soie" Pompadour robe, embroidered with cream silk
flowers, which had cost one thousand dollars. There was a hat to go
with it, which had cost a hundred and twenty-five, and shoes of grey
antelope-skin, buckled with mother-of-pearl, which had cost forty.
There was a gorgeous and intricate ball-dress of pale green chiffon
satin, with orchids embroidered in oxidized silver, and a long court
train, studded with diamonds--and this had cost six thousand dollars
without the jewels! And there was an auto-coat which had cost three
thousand; and an opera-wrap made in Leipsic, of white unborn baby
lamb, lined with ermine, which had cost twelve thousand--with a
thousand additional for a hat to match! Mrs. Landis thought nothing
of paying thirty-five dollars for a lace handkerchief, or sixty
dollars for a pair of spun silk hose, or two hundred dollars for a
pearl and gold-handled parasol trimmed with cascades of chiffon, and
made, like her hats, one for each gown.

"And she insists that these things are worth the money," said Alice.
"She says it's not only the material in them, but the ideas. Each
costume is a study, like a picture. 'I pay for the creative genius
of the artist,' she said to me--'for his ability to catch my ideas
and apply them to my personality--my complexion and hair and eyes.
Sometimes I design my own costumes, and so I know what hard work it
is!'"

Mrs. Landis came from one of New York's oldest families, and she was
wealthy in her own right; she had a palace on Fifth Avenue, and now
that she had turned her husband out, she had nothing at all to put
in it except her clothes. Alice told about the places in which she
kept them--it was like a museum! There was a gown-room, made
dust-proof, of polished hardwood, and with tier upon tier of long
poles running across, and padded skirt-supporters hanging from them.
Everywhere there was order and system--each skirt was numbered, and
in a chiffonier-drawer of the same number you would find the
waist--and so on with hats and stockings and gloves and shoes and
parasols. There was a row of closets, having shelves piled up with
dainty lace-trimmed and beribboned lingerie; there were two closets
full of hats and three of shoes. "When she went West," said Alice,
"one of her maids counted, and found that she had over four hundred
pairs! And she actually has a cabinet with a card-catalogue to keep
track of them. And all the shelves are lined with perfumed silk
sachets, and she has tiny sachets sewed in every skirt and waist;
and she has her own private perfume--she gave me some. She calls it
Occur de Jeannette, and she says she designed it herself, and had it
patented!"

And then Alice went on to describe the maid's work-room, which was
also of polished hardwood, and dust-proof, and had a balcony for
brushing clothes, and wires upon which to hang them, and hot and
cold water, and a big ironing-table and an electric stove. "But
there can't be much work to do," laughed the girl, "for she never
wears a gown more than two or three times. Just think of paying
several thousand dollars for a costume, and giving it to your poor
relations after you have worn it only twice! And the worst of it is
that Mrs. Landis says it's all nothing unusual; you'll find such
arrangements in every home of people who are socially prominent. She
says there are women who boast of never appearing twice in the same
gown, and there's one dreadful personage in Boston who wears each
costume once, and then has it solemnly cremated by her butler!"

"It is wicked to do such things," put in old Mrs. Montague, when she
had heard this tale through. "I don't see how people can get any
pleasure out of it."

"That's what I said," replied Alice.

"To whom did you say that?" asked Montague. "To Mrs. Landis?"

"No," said Alice, "to a cousin of hers. I was downstairs waiting for
her, and this girl came in. And we got to talking about it, and I
said that I didn't think I could ever get used to such things."

"What did she say?" asked the other.

"She answered me strangely," said the girl. "She's tall, and very
stately, and I was a little bit afraid of her. She said, 'You'll get
used to it. Everybody you know will be doing it, and if you try to
do differently they'll take offence; and you won't have the courage
to do without friends. You'll be meaning every day to stop, but you
never will, and you'll go on until you die.'"

"What did you say to that?"

"Nothing," answered Alice. "Just then Mrs. Landis came in, and Miss
Hegan went away."

"Miss Hegan?" echoed Montague.

"Yes," said the other. "That's her name--Laura Hegan. Have you met
her?"






CHAPTER VIII





The Horse Show was held in Madison Square Garden, a building
occupying a whole city block. It seemed to Montague that during the
four days he attended he was introduced to enough people to fill it
to the doors. Each one of the exquisite ladies and gentlemen
extended to him a delicately gloved hand, and remarked what perfect
weather they were having, and asked him how long he had been in New
York, and what he thought of it. Then they would talk about the
horses, and about the people who were present, and what they had on.

He saw little of his brother, who was squiring the Walling ladies
most of the time; and Alice, too, was generally separated from him
and taken care of by others. Yet he was never alone--there was
always some young matron ready to lead him to her carriage and whisk
him away to lunch or dinner.

Many times he wondered why people should be so kind to him, a
stranger, and one who could do nothing for them in return. Mrs.
Billy Alden undertook to explain it to him, one afternoon, as he sat
in her box. There had to be some people to enjoy, it appeared, or
there would be no fun in the game. "Everything is new and strange to
you," said she, "and you're delicious and refreshing; you make these
women think perhaps they oughtn't to be so bored after all! Here's a
woman who's bought a great painting; she's told that it's great, but
she doesn't understand it herself--all she knows is that it cost
her a hundred thousand dollars. And now you come along, and to you
it's really a painting--and don't you see how gratifying that is to
her?"

"Oliver is always telling me it's bad form to admire," said the man,
laughing.

"Yes?" said the other. "Well, don't you let that brother of yours
spoil you. There are more than enough of blase people in town--you
be yourself."

He appreciated the compliment, but added, "I'm afraid that when the
novelty is worn off, people will be tired of me."

"You'll find your place," said Mrs. Alden--"the people you like and
who like you." And she went on to explain that here he was being
passed about among a number of very different "sets," with different
people and different tastes. Society had become split up in that
manner of late--each set being jealous and contemptuous of all the
other sets. Because of the fact that they overlapped a little at the
edges, it was possible for him to meet here a great many people who
never met each other, and were even unaware of each other's
existence.

And Mrs. Alden went on to set forth the difference between these
"sets"; they ran from the most exclusive down to the most "yellow,"
where they shaded off into the disreputable rich--of whom, it
seemed, there were hordes in the city. These included "sporting" and
theatrical and political people, some of whom were very rich indeed;
and these sets in turn shaded off into the criminals and the
demi-monde--who might also easily be rich. "Some day," said Mrs.
Alden "you should get my brother to tell you about all these people.
He's been in politics, you know, and he has a racing-stable."

And Mrs. Alden told him about the subtle little differences in the
conventions of these various sets of Society. There was the matter
of women smoking, for instance. All women smoked, nowadays; but some
would do it only in their own apartments, with their women friends;
and some would retire to an out-of-the-way corner to do it; while
others would smoke in their own dining-rooms, or wherever the men
smoked. All agreed however, in never smoking "in public"--that is,
where they would be seen by people not of their own set. Such, at
any rate, had always been the rule, though a few daring ones were
beginning to defy even that.

Such rules were very rigid, but they were purely conventional, they
had nothing to do with right or wrong: a fact which Mrs. Alden set
forth with her usual incisiveness. A woman, married or unmarried,
might travel with a man all over Europe, and every one might know
that she did it, but it would make no difference, so long as she did
not do it in America. There was one young matron whom Montague would
meet, a raging beauty, who regularly got drunk at dinner parties,
and had to be escorted to her carriage by the butler. She moved in
the most exclusive circles, and every one treated it as a joke.
Unpleasant things like this did not hurt a person unless they got
"out"--that is, unless they became a scandal in the courts or the
newspapers. Mrs. Alden herself had a cousin (whom she cordially
hated) who had gotten a divorce from her husband and married her
lover forthwith and had for this been ostracized by Society. Once
when she came to some semi-public affair, fifty women had risen at
once and left the room! She might have lived with her lover, both
before and after the divorce, and every one might have known it, and
no one would have cared; but the convenances declared that she
should not marry him until a year had elapsed after the divorce.

One thing to which Mrs. Alden could testify, as a result of a
lifetime's observation, was the rapid rate at which these
conventions, even the most essential of them, were giving way, and
being replaced by a general "do as you please." Anyone could see
that the power of women like Mrs. Devon, who represented the old
regime, and were dignified and austere and exclusive, was yielding
before the onslaught of new people, who were bizarre and fantastic
and promiscuous and loud. And the younger sets cared no more about
anyone--nor about anything under heaven, save to have a good time in
their own harum-scarum ways. In the old days one always received a
neatly-written or engraved invitation to dinner, worded in
impersonal and formal style; but the other day Mrs. Alden had found
a message which had been taken from the telephone: "Please come to
dinner, but don't come unless you can bring a man, or we'll be
thirteen at the table."

And along with this went a perfectly incredible increase in luxury
and extravagance. "You are surprised at what you see here to-day,"
said she--"but take my word for it, if you were to come back five
years later, you'd find all our present standards antiquated, and
our present pace-makers sent to the rear. You'd find new hotels and
theatres opening, and food and clothing and furniture that cost
twice as much as they cost now. Not so long ago a private car was a
luxury; now it's as much a necessity as an opera-box or a private
ball-room, and people who really count have private trains. I can
remember when our girls wore pretty muslin gowns in summer, and sent
them to wash; now they wear what they call lingerie gowns, dimity en
princesse, with silk embroidery and real lace and ribbons, that cost
a thousand dollars apiece and won't wash. Years ago when I gave a
dinner, I invited a dozen friends, and my own chef cooked it and my
own servants served it. Now I have to pay my steward ten thousand a
year, and nothing that I have is good enough. I have to ask forty or
fifty people, and I call in a caterer, and he brings everything of
his own, and my servants go off and get drunk. You used to get a
good dinner for ten dollars a plate, and fifteen was something
special; but now you hear of dinners that cost a thousand a plate!
And it's not enough to have beautiful flowers on the table--you have
to have 'scenery'; there must be a rural landscape for a background,
and goldfish in the finger-bowls, and five thousand dollars' worth
of Florida orchids on the table, and floral favours of roses that
cost a hundred and fifty dollars a dozen. I attended a dinner at the
Waldorf last year that had cost fifty thousand dollars; and when I
ask those people to see me, I have to give them as good as I got.
The other day I paid a thousand dollars for a tablecloth!"

"Why do you do it?" asked Montague, abruptly.

"God knows," said the other; "I don't. I sometimes wonder myself. I
guess it's because I've nothing else to do. It's like the story they
tell about my brother--he was losing money in a gambling-place in
Saratoga, and some one said to him, 'Davy, why do you go
there--don't you know the game is crooked?' 'Of course it's
crooked,' said he, 'but, damn it, it's the only game in town!'"

"The pressure is more than anyone can stand," said Mrs. Alden, after
a moment's thought. "It's like trying to swim against a current. You
have to float, and do what every one expects you to do--your
children and your friends and your servants and your tradespeople.
All the world is in a conspiracy against you."

"It's appalling to me," said the man.

"Yes," said the other, "and there's never any end to it. You think
you know it all, but you find you really know very little. Just
think of the number of people there are trying to go the pace! They
say there are seven thousand millionaires in this country, but I say
there are twenty thousand in New York alone--or if they don't own a
million, they're spending the income of it, which amounts to the
same thing. You can figure that a man who pays ten thousand a year
for rent is paying fifty thousand to live; and there's Fifth
Avenue--two miles of it, if you count the uptown and downtown parts;
and there's Madison Avenue, and half a dozen houses adjoining on
every side street; and then there are the hotels and apartment
houses, to say nothing of the West Side and Riverside Drive. And you
meet these mobs of people in the shops and the hotels and the
theatres, and they all want to be better dressed than you. I saw a
woman here to-day that I never saw in my life before, and I heard
her say she'd paid two thousand dollars for a lace handkerchief; and
it might have been true, for I've been asked to pay ten thousand for
a lace shawl at a bargain. It's a common enough thing to see a woman
walking on Fifth Avenue with twenty or thirty thousand dollars'
worth of furs on her. Fifty thousand is often paid for a coat of
sable, and I know of one that cost two hundred thousand. I know
women who have a dozen sets of furs--ermine, chinchilla, black fox,
baby lamb, and mink and sable; and I know a man whose chauffeur quit
him because he wouldn't buy him a ten-thousand-dollar fur coat! And
once people used to pack their furs away and take care of them; but
now they wear them about the street, or at the sea-shore, and you
can fairly see them fade. Or else their cut goes out of fashion, and
so they have to have new ones!"

All that was material for thought. It was all true--there was no
question about that. It seemed to be the rule that whenever you
questioned a tale of the extravagances of New York, you would hear
the next day of something several times more startling. Montague was
staggered at the idea of a two-hundred-thousand-dollar fur coat; and
yet not long afterward there arrived in the city a titled
Englishwoman, who owned a coat worth a million dollars, which
hard-headed insurance companies had insured for half a million. It
was made of the soft plumage of rare Hawaiian birds, and had taken
twenty years to make; each feather was crescent-shaped, and there
were wonderful designs in crimson and gold and black. Every day in
the casual conversation of your acquaintances you heard of similar
incredible things; a tiny antique Persian rug, which could be folded
into an overcoat pocket, for ten thousand dollars; a set of five
"art fans," each blade painted by a famous artist and costing
forty-three thousand dollars; a crystal cup for eighty thousand; an
edition de luxe of the works of Dickens for a hundred thousand; a
ruby, the size of a pigeon's egg, for three hundred thousand. In
some of these great New York palaces there were fountains which cost
a hundred dollars a minute to run; and in the harbour there were
yachts which cost twenty thousand a month to keep in commission.

And that same day, as it chanced, he learned of a brand-new kind of
squandering. He went home to lunch with Mrs. Winnie Duval, and there
met Mrs. Caroline Smythe, with whom he had talked at Castle Havens.
Mrs. Smythe, whose husband had been a well-known Wall Street
plunger, was soft and mushy, and very gushing in manner; and she
asked him to come home to dinner with her, adding, "I'll introduce
you to my babies."

From what Montague had so far seen, he judged that babies played a
very small part in the lives of the women of Society; and so he was
interested, and asked, "How many have you?"

"Only two, in town," said Mrs. Smythe. "I've just come up, you see."

"How old are they?" he inquired politely; and when the lady added,
"About two years," he asked, "Won't they be in bed by dinner time?"

"Oh my, no!" said Mrs. Smythe. "The dear little lambs wait up for
me. I always find them scratching at my chamber door and wagging
their little tails."

Then Mrs. Winnie laughed merrily and said, "Why do you fool him?"
and went on to inform Montague that Caroline's "babies" were
griffons Bruxelloises. Griffons suggested to him vague ideas of
dragons and unicorns and gargoyles; but he said nothing more, save
to accept the invitation, and that evening he discovered that
griffons Bruxelloises were tiny dogs, long-haired, yellow, and
fluffy; and that for her two priceless treasures Mrs. Smythe had an
expert nurse, to whom she paid a hundred dollars a month, and also a
footman, and a special cuisine in which their complicated food was
prepared. They had a regular dentist, and a physician, and gold
plate to eat from. Mrs. Smythe also owned two long-haired St.
Bernards of a very rare breed, and a fierce Great Dane, and a very
fat Boston bull pup--the last having been trained to go for an
airing all alone in her carriage, with a solemn coachman and footman
to drive him.

Montague, deftly keeping the conversation upon the subject of pets,
learned that all this was quite common. Many women in Society
artificially made themselves barren, because of the inconvenience
incidental to pregnancy and motherhood; and instead they lavished
their affections upon cats and dogs. Some of these animals had
elaborate costumes, rivalling in expensiveness those of their
step-mothers. They wore tiny boots, which cost eight dollars a
pair--house boots, and street boots lacing up to the knees; they had
house-coats, walking-coats, dusters, sweaters, coats lined with
ermine, and automobile coats with head and chest-protectors and
hoods and goggles--and each coat fitted with a pocket for its tiny
handkerchief of fine linen or lace! And they had collars set with
rubies and pearls and diamonds--one had a collar that cost ten
thousand dollars! Sometimes there would be a coat to match every
gown of the owner. There were dog nurseries and resting-rooms, in
which they might be left temporarily; and manicure parlours for
cats, with a physician in charge. When these pets died, there was an
expensive cemetery in Brooklyn especially for their interment; and
they would be duly embalmed and buried in plush-lined casket, and
would have costly marble monuments. When one of Mrs. Smythe's best
loved pugs had fallen ill of congestion of the liver, she had had
tan-bark put upon the street in front of her house; and when in
spite of this the dog died, she had sent out cards edged in black,
inviting her friends to a "memorial service." Also she showed
Montague a number of books with very costly bindings, in which were
demonstrated the unity, simplicity, and immortality of the souls of
cats and dogs.

Apparently the sentimental Mrs. Smythe was willing to talk about
these pets all through dinner; and so was her aunt, a thin and
angular spinster, who sat on Montague's other side. And he was
willing to listen--he wanted to know it all. There were umbrellas
for dogs, to be fastened over their backs in wet weather; there were
manicure and toilet sets, and silver medicine-chests, and
jewel-studded whips. There were sets of engraved visiting-cards;
there were wheel-chairs in which invalid cats and dogs might be
taken for an airing. There were shows for cats and dogs, with
pedigrees and prizes, and nearly as great crowds as the Horse Show;
Mrs. Smythe's St. Bernards were worth seven thousand dollars apiece,
and there were bull-dogs worth twice that. There was a woman who had
come all the way from the Pacific coast to have a specialist perform
an operation upon the throat of her Yorkshire terrier! There was
another who had built for her dog a tiny Queen Anne cottage, with
rooms papered and carpeted and hung with lace curtains! Once a young
man of fashion had come to the Waldorf and registered himself and
"Miss Elsie Cochrane"; and when the clerk made the usual inquiries
as to the relationship of the young lady, it transpired that Miss
Elsie was a dog, arrayed in a prim little tea-gown, and requiring a
room to herself. And then there was a tale of a cat which had
inherited a life-pension from a forty-thousand-dollar estate; it had
a two-floor apartment and several attendants, and sat at table and
ate shrimps and Italian chestnuts, and had a velvet couch for naps,
and a fur-lined basket for sleeping at night!

Four days of horses were enough for Montague, and on Friday morning,
when Siegfried Harvey called him up and asked if he and Alice would
come out to "The Roost" for the week-end, he accepted gladly.
Charlie Carter was going, and volunteered to take them in his car;
and so again they crossed the Williamsburg Bridge--"the Jewish
passover," as Charlie called it--and went out on Long Island.

Montague was very anxious to get a "line" on Charlie Carter; for he
had not been prepared for the startling promptness with which this
young man had fallen at Alice's feet. It was so obvious, that
everybody was smiling over it--he was with her every minute that he
could arrange it, and he turned up at every place to which she was
invited. Both Mrs. Winnie and Oliver were quite evidently
complacent, but Montague was by no means the same. Charlie had
struck him as a good-natured but rather weak youth, inclined to
melancholy; he was never without a cigarette in his fingers, and
there had been signs that he was not quite proof against the
pitfalls which Society set about him in the shape of decanters and
wine-cups: though in a world where the fragrance of spirits was
never out of one's nostrils, and where people drank with such
perplexing frequency, it was hard to know where to draw a line.

"You won't find my place like Havens's," Siegfried Harvey had said.
"It is real country." Montague found it the most attractive of all
the homes he had seen so far. It was a big rambling house, all in
rustic style, with great hewn logs outside, and rafters within, and
a winding oak stairway, and any number of dens and cosy corners, and
broad window-seats with mountains of pillows. Everything here was
built for comfort--there was a billiard-room and a smoking-room, and
a real library with readable bogles and great chairs in which one
sank out of sight. There were log fires blazing everywhere, and
pictures on the walls that told of sport, and no end of guns and
antlers and trophies of all sorts. But you were not to suppose that
all this elaborate rusticity would be any excuse for the absence of
attendants in livery, and a chef who boasted the cordon bleu, and a
dinner-table resplendent with crystal and silver and orchids and
ferns. After all, though the host called it a "small" place, he had
invited twenty guests, and he had a hunter in his stables for each
one of them.

But the most wonderful thing about "The Roost" was the fact that, at
a touch of a button, all the walls of the lower rooms vanished into
the second story, and there was one huge, log-lighted room, with
violins tuning up and calling to one's feet. They set a fast pace
here--the dancing lasted until three o'clock, and at dawn again they
were dressed and mounted, and following the pink-coated grooms and
the hounds across the frost-covered fields.

Montague was half prepared for a tame fox, but this was pared him.
There was a real game, it seemed; and soon the pack gave tongue, and
away went the hunt. It was the wildest ride that Montague ever had
taken--over ditches and streams and innumerable rail-fences, and
through thick coverts and densely populated barnyards; but he was in
at the death, and Alice was only a few yards behind, to the immense
delight of the company. This seemed to Montague the first real life
he had met, and he thought to himself that these full-blooded and
high-spirited men and women made a "set" into which he would have
been glad to fit--save only that he had to earn his living, and they
did not.

In the afternoon there was more riding, and walks in the crisp
November air; and indoors, bridge and rackets and ping-pong, and a
fast and furious game of roulette, with the host as banker. "Do I
look much like a professional gambler?" he asked of Montague; and
when the other replied that he had not yet met any New York
gamblers, young Harvey went on to tell how he had gone to buy this
apparatus (the sale of which was forbidden by law) and had been
asked by the dealer how "strong" he wanted it!

Then in the evening there was more dancing, and on Sunday another
hunt. That night a gambling mood seemed to seize the company--there
were two bridge tables, and in another room the most reckless game
of poker that Montague had ever sat in. It broke up at three in the
morning, and one of the company wrote him a cheque for sixty-five
hundred dollars; but even that could not entirely smooth his
conscience, nor reconcile him to the fever that was in his blood.

Most important to him, however, was the fact that during the game he
at last got to know Charlie Carter. Charlie did not play, for the
reason that he was drunk, and one of the company told him so and
refused to play with him; which left poor Charlie nothing to do but
get drunker. This he did, and came and hung over the shoulders of
the players, and told the company all about himself.

Montague was prepared to allow for the "wild oats" of a youngster
with unlimited money, but never in his life had he heard or dreamed
of anything like this boy. For half an hour he wandered about the
table, and poured out a steady stream of obscenities; his mind was
like a swamp, in which dwelt loathsome and hideous serpents which
came to the surface at night and showed their flat heads and their
slimy coils. In the heavens above or the earth beneath there was
nothing sacred to him; there was nothing too revolting to be spewed
out. And the company accepted the performance as an old story--the
men would laugh, and push the boy away, and say, "Oh, Charlie, go to
the devil!"

After it was all over, Montague took one of the company aside and
asked him what it meant; to which the man replied: "Good God! Do you
mean that nobody has told you about Charlie Carter?"

It appeared that Charlie was one of the "gilded youths" of the
Tenderloin, whose exploits had been celebrated in the papers. And
after the attendants had bundled him off to bed, several of the men
gathered about the fire and sipped hot punch, and rehearsed for
Montague's benefit some of his leading exploits.

Charlie was only twenty-three, it seemed; and when he was ten his
father had died and left eight or ten millions in trust for him, in
the care of a poor, foolish aunt whom he twisted about his ringer.
At the age of twelve he was a cigarette fiend, and had the run of
the wine-cellar. When he went to a rich private school he took whole
trunks full of cigarettes with him, and finally ran away to Europe,
to acquire the learning of the brothels of Paris. And then he came
home and struck the Tenderloin; and at three o'clock one morning he
walked through a plate-glass window, and so the newspapers took him
up. That had suddenly opened a new vista in life for Charlie--he
became a devotee of fame; everywhere he went he was followed by
newspaper reporters and a staring crowd. He carried wads as big
round as his arm, and gave away hundred-dollar tips to bootblacks,
and lost forty thousand dollars in a game of poker. He gave a fete
to the demi-monde, with a jewelled Christmas tree in midsummer, and
fifty thousand dollars' worth of splendour. But the greatest stroke
of all was the announcement that he was going to build a submarine
yacht and fill it with chorus-girls!--Now Charlie had sunk out of
public attention, and his friends would not see him for days; he
would be lying in a "sporting house" literally wallowing in
champagne.

And all this, Montague realized, his brother must have known! And he
had said not a word about it--because of the eight or ten millions
which Charlie would have when he was twenty-five!






CHAPTER IX





In the morning they went home with others of the party by train.
They could not wait for Charlie and his automobile, because Monday
was the opening night of the Opera, and no one could miss that. Here
Society would appear in its most gorgeous raiment, and, there would
be a show of jewellery such as could be seen nowhere else in the
world.

General Prentice and his wife had opened their town-house, and had
invited them to dinner and to share their box; and so at about
half-past nine o'clock Montague found himself seated in a great
balcony of the shape of a horseshoe, with several hundred of the
richest people in the city. There was another tier of boxes above,
and three galleries above that, and a thousand or more people seated
and standing below him. Upon the big stage there was an elaborate
and showy play, the words of which were sung to the accompaniment of
an orchestra.

Now Montague had never heard an opera, and he was fond of music. The
second act had just begun when he came in, and all through it he sat
quite spellbound, listening to the most ravishing strains that ever
he had heard in his life. He scarcely noticed that Mrs. Prentice was
spending her time studying the occupants of the other boxes through
a jewelled lorgnette, or that Oliver was chattering to her daughter.

But after the act was over, Oliver got him alone outside the box,
and whispered, "For God's sake, Allan, don't make a fool of
yourself."

"Why, what's the matter?" asked the other.

"What will people think," exclaimed Oliver, "seeing you sitting
there like a man in a dope dream?"

"Why," laughed the other, "they'll think I'm listening to the
music."

To which Oliver responded, "People don't come to the Opera to listen
to the music."

This sounded like a joke, but it was not. To Society the Opera was a
great state function, an exhibition of far more exclusiveness and
magnificence than the Horse Show; and Society certainly had the
right to say, for it owned the opera-house and ran it. The real
music-lovers who came, either stood up in the back, or sat in the
fifth gallery, close to the ceiling, where the air was foul and hot.
How much Society cared about the play was sufficiently indicated by
the fact that all of the operas were sung in foreign languages, and
sung so carelessly that the few who understood the languages could
make but little of the words. Once there was a world-poet who
devoted his life to trying to make the Opera an art; and in the
battle with Society he all but starved to death. Now, after half a
century, his genius had triumphed, and Society consented to sit for
hours in darkness and listen to the domestic disputes of German gods
and goddesses. But what Society really cared for was a play with
beautiful costumes and scenery and dancing, and pretty songs to
which one could listen while one talked; the story must be elemental
and passionate, so that one could understand it in pantomime--say
the tragic love of a beautiful and noble-minded courtesan for a
gallant young man of fashion.

Nearly every one who came to the Opera had a glass, by means of
which he could bring each gorgeously-clad society dame close to him,
and study her at leisure. There were said to be two hundred million
dollars' worth of diamonds in New York, and those that were not in
the stores were very apt to be at this show; for here was where they
could accomplish the purpose for which they existed--here was where
all the world came to stare at them. There were nine prominent
Society women, who among them displayed five million dollars' worth
of jewels. You would see stomachers which looked like a piece of a
coat of mail, and were made wholly of blazing diamonds. You would
see emeralds and rubies and diamonds and pearls made in tiaras--that
is to say, imitation crowns and coronets--and exhibited with a
stout and solemn dowager for a pediment. One of the Wallings had set
this fashion, and now every one of importance wore them. One lady to
whom Montague was introduced made a speciality of pearls--two black
pearl ear-rings at forty thousand dollars, a string at three hundred
thousand, a brooch of pink pearls at fifty thousand, and two
necklaces at a quarter of a million each!

This incessant repetition of the prices of things came to seem very
sordid; but Montague found that there was no getting away from it.
The people in Society who paid these prices affected to be above all
such considerations, to be interested only in the beauty and
artistic excellence of the things themselves; but one found that
they always talked about the prices which other people had paid, and
that somehow other people always knew what they had paid. They took
care also to see that the public and the newspapers knew what they
had paid, and knew everything else that they were doing. At this
Opera, for instance, there was a diagram of the boxes printed upon
the programme, and a list of all the box-holders, so that anyone
could tell who was who. You might see these great dames in their
gorgeous robes coming from their carriages, with crowds staring at
them and detectives hovering about. And the bosom of each would be
throbbing with a wild and wonderful vision of the moment when she
would enter her box, and the music would be forgotten, and all eyes
would be turned upon her; and she would lay aside her wraps, and
flash upon the staring throngs, a vision of dazzling splendour.

Some of these jewels were family treasures, well known to New York
for generations; and in such cases it was becoming the fashion to
leave the real jewels in the safe-deposit vault, and to wear
imitation stones exactly like them. From homes where the jewels were
kept, detectives were never absent, and in many cases there were
detectives watching the detectives; and yet every once in a while
the newspapers would be full of a sensational story of a robbery.
Then the unfortunates who chanced to be suspected would be seized by
the police and subjected to what was jocularly termed the "third
degree," and consisted of tortures as elaborate and cruel as any
which the Spanish Inquisition had invented. The advertising value of
this kind of thing was found to be so great that famous actresses
also had costly jewels, and now and then would have them stolen.

That night, when they had got home, Montague had a talk with his
cousin about Charlie Carter. He discovered a peculiar situation. It
seemed that Alice already knew that Charlie had been "bad." He was
sick and miserable; and her beauty and innocence had touched him and
made him ashamed of himself, and ho had hinted darkly at dreadful
evils. Thus carefully veiled, and tinged with mystery and romance,
Montague could understand how Charlie made an interesting and
appealing figure. "He says I'm different from any girl he ever met,"
said Alice--a remark of such striking originality that her cousin
could not keep back his smile.

Alice was not the least bit in love with him, and had no idea of
being; and she said that she would accept no invitations, and never
go alone with him; but she did not see how she could avoid him when
she met him at other people's houses. And to this Montague had to
assent.