“Who is she, Bob?”
“I know a few of them—suppose you describe her.”
The stranger halted and looked at his friend and host with commiserating pity. When he deigned to speak, it was with infinite scorn.
“Describe her! Why, you fool, I’m no poet laureate, and, if I were, I couldn’t describe her!”
For reply, he received only the disconcerting mockery of ironical laughter.
“My interest,” the young man of the fence calmly deigned to explain, “is impersonal. I want to meet her, precisely as I’d get up early in the morning and climb a mountain to see the sun rise over a particularly lovely valley. It’s not as a woman, but as an object of art.”
On other and meaner days, the track at Churchill Downs may be in large part surrendered to its more rightful patrons, the chronics and apostles of the turf, and racing may be only racing as roulette is roulette. But on Derby Day it is as though the community paid tribute to the savor of the soil, and honored in memory the traditions of the ancient régime.
To-day, in the club-house inclosure, the roomy verandahs, the close-cropped lawn and even the roof-gallery were crowded; not indeed to the congestion of the grandstand’s perspiring swarm, for Fashion’s reservation still allowed some luxury of space, but beyond the numbers of less important times. In the burgeoning variety of new spring gowns and hats, the women made bouquets, as though living flowers had been brought to the shrine of the thoroughbred.
A table at the far end of the verandah seemed to be a little Mecca for strolling visitors. In the party surrounding it, one might almost have caught the impression that the prettiness of the feminine display had been here arranged, and that in scattering attractive types along the front of the white club-house, some landscape gardener had reserved the most appealing beauties for a sort of climacteric effect at the end.