VI
ABOUT THE PARK AND LOVE STORIES
All the preparations that Mrs. Ess Kay had to make for Newport kept us two more days in New York; and it was terribly hot, but I was not sorry to stay, because we did so many amusing things.
Mr. Doremus was detained too--by his tailor, he said--so we saw a good deal of him, as Mrs. Van der Windt had left for her Newport cottage. We did go to a roof garden entertainment, after all, and it was most fascinating, but quite without the feeling that you might fall off, which I had expected to have. I saw the moon coming up, and gilding thousands of roofs, and I couldn't help wondering which was the roof of that club where poor, handsome Jim Brett was employed; though of course it was impossible to speak of him to anyone except Vivace.
We lunched one day at an enormous and very fashionable red brick hotel called the Waldorf-Astoria, and went into a Turkish Room, and had delicious things to eat in a beautiful restaurant, which had not at all an out-of-season air, though Mrs. Ess Kay said that most of the well-groomed looking people whom I suspected of being leaders of the Four Hundred were only "trippers." I do wonder, by the way, why one always has an innate sense of contempt for trippers, and longs to be sniffy and show one's own superiority? We must all be trippers somewhere and sometimes, or we would never see anything of the world; indeed I suppose I am by way of being a tripper now. But one never seems to regard one's self in such a light, or imagine that anybody else could be so undiscerning.
I hadn't known that a hotel could be as big as the Waldorf-Astoria, though Mrs. Ess Kay says there are several just about as large in New York, and she has heard there are one or two in Chicago, but she thanks Heaven she doesn't know anything personally about that. When she made this remark I remembered what Sally had told me in confidence about Mrs. Ess Kay's life before she began to qualify for the Four Hundred. But of course I did not make any allusion to the subject, for fear it was a skeleton in her closet. And Sally says that well-regulated Chicago people think New York a one-horse place compared to their town, which is really wonderful and most interesting, as I shall find out if I see it. I wish I could, but I suppose I shan't, as I came over to visit Mrs. Ess Kay, not to do sight-seeing.
The second day after we came back from West Point, as I went downstairs the first thing in the morning, I heard Mrs. Ess Kay at the telephone, which is in a little room, along a corridor off the fountain court.
She was having a long conversation with someone, laughing and chatting just as if she were talking to a visitor; and presently my name came in. "Yes, Lady Betty Bu——, no, not pronounced that way, my child. As if it were spelt B-U-C-K-, yes, that's right. Such a pretty girl, a perfect dear. I expect the men will be wild about her at Newport. Potter raves over her. Ha, ha, ha! Do you think so? Well, perhaps. I've known stranger things to happen. No, it's not her father, but her brother, who's the Duke; awfully good-looking. I wish he could have come too. But you see Sally wouldn't--you know what Sally is. No, she's never got over that old affair. Southern women are so romantic. Yes, I'll bring dear little Betty with me if it won't tire you. She——"
Then I began to think I ought to let her know I was there, for one hates to eavesdrop. So I yelled at the top of my lungs that I was in the hall, waiting to go to breakfast, and couldn't help hearing every word she said. However, she didn't mind a bit, and called to me to come into the telephone room.