Spanish, having abandoned New York, could no longer bear Alma loving company at picnic, rout and racket. What was Alma to do? She lived for routs, reveled in rackets, joyed in picnics. Must these delights be swept away? She couldn't go alone—it was too expensive. Besides, it would evince a lack of class.
Alma, as proud and as wedded to her social position as any silken member of the Purple and Fine Linen Gang that ever rolled down Fifth Avenue in her brougham, revolved these matters upon her wheel of thought. Also, she came to conclusions. She, an admitted belle, could not consent to social obliteration. Spanish had fled; she worshipped his black eyes, his high courage; she would keep a heart-corner vacant for him in case he came back. Pending his return, however, she would go into society; and, for those reasons of expense and class and form, she would not go alone.
Alma submitted her position to a beribboned jury of her peers. Their judgment ran abreast of her own.
“A goil would be a mutt,” they said, “to stay cocked up at home. An' yet a goil couldn't go chasin' around be her lonesome. Alma”—this was their final word—“you must cop off another steady.”
“But what would Johnny say?” asked Alma; for she couldn't keep her thoughts off Spanish, of whom she stood a little bit in fear.
“Johnny's beat it, ain't he?” returned the advisory jury of friends. “There ain't no kick comin' to a guy what's beat it. He ain't no longer in th' picture.”
Alma, thus free to pick and choose by virtue of the absence of Spanish, picked the Dropper. The latter chieftain was flattered. Taking Alma proudly yet tenderly under his mighty arm, he led her to suppers such as she had never eaten, bought her drinks such as she had never tasted, revolved with her at rackets where tickets were a dollar a throw, the orchestra seven pieces, and the floor shone like glass. It was a cut or two above anything that Spanish had given her, and Alma, who thought it going some, failed not to say so.
Alma was proud of the Dropper; the Dropper was proud of her. She told her friends of the money he spent; and the friends warmed the cockles of her little heart by shrilly exclaiming at pleasant intervals:
“Ain't he th' swell guy!”
“Betcher boots he's th' swell guy,” Alma would rejoin; “an' he's got money to boin a wet dog! Th' only t'ing that worries me,” Alma would conclude, “is Johnny. S'ppose he blows in some day, an' lays for th' Dropper?'