Mr. Brad said he liked it, because it looked well and did not mean anything; he liked all such titles, the “Pious Pirate,” the “Lucid Lunatic,” the “Sympathetic Siren,” the “Guileless Girl,” and so on.
The announcement of publication had the effect of putting Philip in high spirits for the Mavick reception-spirits tempered, however, by the embarrassment natural to a modest man that he would be painfully conspicuous. This first placarding of one's name is a peculiar and mixed sensation. The letters seem shamefully naked, and the owner seems exposed and to have parted with a considerable portion of his innate privacy. His first fancy is that everybody will see it. But this fancy only comes once. With experience he comes to doubt if anybody except himself will see it.
To those most concerned the Mavick reception was the event of a lifetime. To the town—that is, to a thousand or two persons occupying in their own eyes an exclusive position it was one of the events of the season, and, indeed, it was the sensation for a couple of days. The historian of social life formerly had put upon him the task of painfully describing all that went to make such an occasion brilliant—the house itself, the decorations, the notable company, men distinguished in the State or the Street, women as remarkable for their beauty as for their courage in its exhibition, the whole world of fashion and of splendid extravagance upon which the modiste and the tailor could look with as much pride as the gardener does upon a show of flowers which his genius has brought to perfection.
The historian has no longer this responsibility. It is transferred to a kind of trust. A race of skillful artists has arisen, who, in combination with the caterers, the decorators, and the milliners, produce a composite piece of literature in which all details are woven into a splendid whole—a composition rhetorical, humorous, lyrical, a noble apotheosis of wealth and beauty which carefully satisfies individual vanity and raises in the mind a noble picture of modern civilization. The pen and the pencil contribute to this splendid result in the daily chronicle of our life. Those who are not present are really witnesses of the scene, and this pictorial and literary triumph is justified in the fact that no other effort of the genius of reproduction is so eagerly studied by the general public. Not only in the city, but in the remote villages, these accounts are perused with interest, and it must be taken as an evidence of the new conception of the duties of the favored of fortune to the public pleasure that the participants in these fetes overcome, though reluctantly, their objection to notoriety.
No other people in the world are so hospitable as the Americans, and so willing to incur discomfort in showing hospitality. No greater proof of this can be needed than the effort to give princely entertainments in un-princely houses, where opposing streams of guests fight for progress in scant passages and on narrow stairways, and pack themselves in stifling rooms. The Mavick house, it should be said, was perfectly adapted to the throng that seemed to fill but did not crowd it. The spacious halls, the noble stairways, the ample drawing-rooms, the ballroom, the music-room, the library, the picture-gallery, the dining-room, the conservatory—into these the crowd flowed or lingered without confusion or annoyance and in a continual pleasure of surprise. “The best point of view,” said an artist of Philip's acquaintance, “is just here.” They were standing in the great hall looking up at that noble gallery from which flowed down on either hand a broad stairway.
“I didn't know there was so much beauty in New York. It never before had such an opportunity to display itself. There is room for the exhibition of the most elaborate toilets, and the costumes really look regal in such a setting.”
When Philip was shown to the dressing-room, conscious that the servant was weighing him lightly in the social scale on account of his early arrival, he found a few men who were waiting to make their appearance more seasonable. They were young men, who had the air of being bored by this sort of thing, and greeted each other with a look of courteous surprise, as much as to say, “Hello! you here?” One of them, whom Philip knew slightly, who had the reputation of being the distributer if not the fountain of social information, and had the power of attracting gossip as a magnet does iron filings, gave Philip much valuable information concerning the function.
“Mrs. Mavick has done it this time. Everybody has tumbled in. Washington is drained of its foreign diplomats, the heavy part of the cabinet is moved over to represent the President, who sent a gracious letter, the select from Boston, the most ancient from Philadelphia, and I know that Chicago comes in a special train. Oh, it's the thing. I assure you there was a scramble for invitations in the city. Lots of visiting nobility—Count de l'Auney, I know, and that little snob, Lord Montague.”
“Who is he?”
“Lord Crewe Monmouth Fitzwilliam, the Marquis of Montague, eldest son of the Duke of Tewkesbury. He's a daisy.