"Who are they," Yetta whispered as she was brushing her hair in Maud's bedroom.
"Matthews writes 'best sellers'—doesn't expect his friends to read them. Conklin has money—afford to write high-brow books that don't sell. Have to read between the lines. I'm too busy. Potter's a decadent poet. A bore, but all the rage. Mrs. Treadway—Lilian Leberwurtz—motherly old soul. Never know to look at her that she's the best-paid woman in the game—come on."
Of course Yetta was most interested in Mrs. Treadway. She would hardly have called her motherly, although she sometimes referred to her son in Harvard and frequently used the phrase—"when you get to be my age."
She was a large-bosomed, gaudy person with an almost expressionless face. Her gown looked cheap in spite of its evident expensiveness, and her jewellery was massive. But it was not her appearance nor her ponderous condescension which troubled Yetta. Mrs. Treadway in her first half-dozen words showed herself to be utterly sophisticated. She did not try to hide the insincerity of her work—she seemed to glory in it. Her first concern was to make it apparent that she was not such a fool as one would judge from her sentimental advice.
Matthews exuded prosperity from his lavender socks up to his insistent tie—but the brilliancy did not seem to go higher. Conklin was apologetic in comparison. His face was spare, and when he was amused, deep curved wrinkles formed on either side of his mouth like brackets. The parenthetical effect of his smile was heightened by the fact that the rest of his face remained sombre. The poet looked his part.
When Yetta arrived, they were all looking at the latest number of La vie parisienne. Mrs. Treadway was shaking—like a gelatine pudding—over the predicament in which one of Fabriano's naked women was portrayed. Potter began a ponderous argument on the humor of Audrey Beardsley's lines and the wit of Matisse's color. He pronounced Fabriano "too obvious." He was happily interrupted by the announcement of dinner.
The conversation rambled on through the meal. No one stuck to a subject after their epigrams had run out. Nobody was deeply interested in anything. Much of it dealt with things about which Yetta was proud of her ignorance.
The dinner was almost a disaster to her. "Of course," she told herself as she walked home, "this group is not typical. There are people, there must be people, who take their writing seriously." But the attitude of Maud Ripley and her friends had shocked Yetta deeply. The worst of it was that they respected her in a way—because she was "making good." But the fact that she was in earnest did not interest them. She would not have dropped the least in their esteem if she had been utterly insincere. She felt as if she had been insulted.
The next day a new incident increased Yetta's feeling of foreignness in the office. She was waiting in the reporters' room for a chance to see Brace. Cowan, the gray-haired sporting editor, was telling whimsical stories of the "old days" when he had been a cub. Although older in years than the others, he was the youngest-hearted of them all. Yetta felt more drawn to him than to any one else on The Star.
Suddenly a curly-haired Irishman, O'Rourke, burst in. He always entered a room with a deafening bang.