THE RED CARPET
The Torbys were giving a large dinner-party, and a scarlet carpet was rolled out from the glass and iron of their grilled door to the curb of the Fifth Avenue gutter—a carpet as red as a cardinal's robe, as the flags in the Bolshevist meeting which was being held simultaneously two miles away in Madison Square and giving the police a good deal of trouble.
It was customary to put on new clothes and treasured jewels for the Torby parties, for they gave very good parties; they were fashionable, and as they had been important, financially and socially, in New York for two generations, and as most other New Yorkers had only lived there a year or two, the Torbys were generally assumed to be as aboriginal as the rocks of Manhattan Island.
As a matter of fact, the first identified Torby, Ephraim by name, had strolled down to the great city from a Vermont farm just before the Civil War, and had made his fortune in questionable real-estate deals during the following years of unrest. But when the present Torby, William, said, "My father used to say that when he held the property at the corner of Twenty-third Street—" it sounded as if the family had always been landed proprietors; and Trevillian Torby, William's son, just twenty-four and not deeply interested in ancestry, had actually come to believe, though he of course knew all the facts, that the Torbys were the oldest and best family in America, and he was very scornful of newcomers from other States or countries who drifted into the metropolis to make their fortunes.
Hewer, the Torby butler, stood in the hall, wearing the old-fashioned livery the Torbys affected. Hewer was not the kind of butler who opens the door; on the contrary, when the great double doors had been swung open by two footmen, Hewer was discovered standing back center, doing absolutely nothing, except, if a female guest should be so thoughtless as to direct her steps to the men's dressing-room, or a male to the women's, he set them right with a slight but autocratic gesture of the hand.
Hewer was rather a young man to be so very great. He was the son of one of the gamekeepers on the Duke of Wessex's place, and being ambitious and having a weak heart, he allowed it to be known through the proper channels, when the Torbys were staying with the Duke, that he would like to go to America; and the Torbys, who had had a great deal of trouble with butlers, snapped him up at once.
At first Hewer had found social distinctions in America somewhat confusing. He had been brought up in the strictest sect of inherited aristocracy, but some of his friends who had been in the United States explained to him that there everything was plutocratic—that nothing mattered but money. Hewer thought this not such a bad idea; but when he reached New York, he found it wasn't true. Social distinctions were not entirely based on money—not nearly as much so as in London. He had a friend living second footman to the third or fourth richest family in America, and it appeared that they were asked nowhere. Of course his own Torbys were all right—absolutely all right; they not only had visiting royalties to stay with them, but what did not always follow, they stayed with those same royalties when they went abroad.
As the motor doors began to slam, Hewer placed one foot on the lower step of the Torbys' beautiful Italian stairway, banked on each side with white lilies in honor of the party, and prepared to announce the first guest who issued from the dressing-room. If he did not know the name (though he almost always did, for he was intelligent, interested in his job, and had been doing the telephoning for the Torby parties for several years), he just drooped his ear toward the guest's mouth for a dilatory second, and then having caught it, he moved straight away upstairs, like a hunting-dog that had picked up the scent.