The whole seemed wonderful and beautiful still. But the parts of this life, seriously analyzed, seemed to turn to dust and ashes. Of course, a hundred little shop-girls might ache with envy at reading that Mrs. Harvey Brock was to give her debutante daughter a fancy- dress ball, costing ten thousand dollars, and might hang wistfully over the pictures of Miss Peggy Brock in her Dresden gown with her ribbon-tied crook; but Susan knew that Peggy cried and scolded the whole afternoon, before the dance, because Teddy Russell was not coming, that young Martin Brock drank too much on that evening and embarrassed his entire family before he could be gotten upstairs, and that Mrs. Brock considered the whole event a failure because some favors, for which she had cabled to Paris, did not come, and the effect of the german was lost. Somehow, the "lovely and gifted heiress" of the newspapers never seemed to Susan at all reconcilable with Dolly Ripley, vapid, overdressed, with diamonds sparkling about her sallow throat, and the "jolly impromptu" trip of the St. Johns to New York lost its point when one knew it was planned because the name of young Florence St. John had been pointedly omitted from Ella Saunders dance list.
Boasting, lying, pretending--how weary Susan got of it all! She was too well schooled to smile when Ella, meeting the Honorable Mary Saunders and Sir Charles Saunders, of London, said magnificently, "We bear the same arms, Sir Charles, but of course ours is the colonial branch of the family!" and she nodded admiringly at Dolly Ripley's boyish and blunt fashion of saying occasionally "We Ripleys,--oh, we drink and gamble and do other things, I admit; we're not saints! But we can't lie, you know!"
"I hate to take the kiddies to New York, Mike," perhaps some young matron would say simply. "Percy's family is one of the old, old families there, you know, shamelessly rich, and terribly exclusive! And one doesn't want the children to take themselves seriously yet awhile!"
"Bluffers!" the smiling and interested Miss Brown would say to herself, as she listened. She listened a great deal; everyone was willing to talk, and she was often amused at the very slight knowledge that could carry a society girl through a conversation. In Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's offices there would be instant challenges, even at auntie's table affectation met its just punishment, and inaccuracy was promptly detected. But there was no such censorship here.
"Looks like a decent little cob!" some girl would say, staring at rider passing the hotel window, at teatime.