"Always referring to her papa and her brother," I thought. "What a sweet child."
Presently she and her long-faced chum were hailed by a group of young men and women, and, excusing themselves to us, they ran over to join them. I felt like a man sipping at a glass of wine when the glass is suddenly seized from his hand
Some time later I sat on a cane chair amid flower-beds in front of the Rigi Kulm, inhaling the scented evening air and gazing down the sloping side of the lawn. Women and girls were returning from the post-office, many of them with letters in their hands. Some of these were so impatient to know their contents that they were straining their eyes to read them in the sickly light that fell from a sparse row of electric lamps. I watched their faces.
In one case it was quite evident that the letter was a love-message, and that the girl who was reading it was tremendously happy. In another I wondered whether the missive had come from a son. It was for Miss Tevkin's return that I was watching. But the dinner-gong sounded before she made her appearance
CHAPTER III
DINNER at the Rigi Kulm on a Saturday evening was not merely a meal. It was, in addition, or chiefly, a great social function and a gown contest
The band was playing. As each matron or girl made her appearance in the vast dining-room the female boarders already seated would look her over with feverish interest, comparing her gown and diamonds with their own. It was as though it were especially for this parade of dresses and finery that the band was playing. As the women came trooping in, arrayed for the exhibition, some timid, others brazenly self-confident, they seemed to be marching in time to the music, like so many chorus-girls tripping before a theater audience, or like a procession of model-girls at a style-display in a big department store. Many of the women strutted affectedly, with "refined" mien. Indeed, I knew that most of them had a feeling as though wearing a hundred-and-fifty-dollar dress was in itself culture and education
Mrs. Kalch kept talking to me, now aloud, now in whispers. She was passing judgment on the gowns and incidentally initiating me into some of the innermost details of the gown race. It appeared that the women kept tab on one another's dresses, shirt-waists, shoes, ribbons, pins, earrings. She pointed out two matrons who had never been seen twice in the same dress, waist, or skirt, although they had lived in the hotel for more than five weeks. Of one woman she informed me that she could afford to wear a new gown every hour in the year, but that she was "too big a slob to dress up and too lazy to undress even when she went to bed"; of another, that she would owe her grocer and butcher rather than go to the country with less than ten big trunks full of duds; of a third, that she was repeatedly threatening to leave the hotel because its bills of fare were typewritten, whereas "for the money she paid she could go to a place with printed menu-cards."
"Must have been brought up on printed menu-cards," one of the other women at our table commented, with a laugh
"That's right," Mrs. Kalch assented, appreciatively. "I could not say whether her father was a horse-driver or a stoker in a bath-house, but I do know that her husband kept a coal-and-ice cellar a few years ago."