“Oh no! I'm a débutante. And mother says she wants to be with me when I take my first cocktail and smoke my first cigarette.”
“Dear girl, Daisy, so fresh and unspoiled! Her mother is one of a thousand.”
This from Manley Knight, who constituted himself Daisy's proxy in the matter of cocktails and drank all that would have been Daisy's had her mother permitted.
Goldwin Leathersham seemed to be acting as proxy for some débutante also, for he seemed to feel pretty bobbish, but Warble was only slightly interested in the whole matter.
She rolled her Wedgwooden eyes about, hoping the horde would be herded toward the dining-room. But no such luck.
Instead they drifted in the opposite direction and, swept along with the crowd, Warble found herself in one of a serried series of gilt chairs, facing a platform as large as a theater stage.
An erudite looking man who appeared on the platform received tumultous applause.
“Who is he?” Warble whispered to her neighbor, who chanced to be Avery Goodman, “an impersonator?”
“Lord, no; it's Wunstone, the great scientist—rants on Fourth Avenue dimensions, or something like that.”
In a tone of forceful mildness the speaker began: “It must be conceded that, other things being equal, and granting the investiture of all insensate communication, that a psychic moment may or may not, in accordance with what under no circumstances could be termed irrelevancy, become warily regarded as a coherent symbol by one obviously of a trenchant humor. But, however, in proof of a smouldering discretion, no feature is entitled to less exorbitant honor than the unquenchable demand of endurance.