"I should not ask you down, else, my dear—you should credit me that far," she had replied, a tinge of reproach in her tone. And so, an hour or so after dinner on Sunday night, Louise, willowy yet full-blossomed and splendid in a simple princesse dress of white broadcloth, a gardenia nestling in an embrasure of her velvety auburn hair, and a tiny-linked chain of gold, with aquamarine pendants—a gift from Laura—around her firm white neck, went, for the first time since she had been in the house, to the already crowded main floor.
Louise, in her inexperience, could not know that the gathering really was little less than an apotheosis of the declasée; she merely found some of the people agreeable, others of them unconsciously naïve in their ebullient enthusiasm over their imaginary achievements or accomplishments, still others frankly laughable for their indurated habit of self laudation.
It was in the main, so far as its social side went, an assemblage of persons, men and women, who, thrust outside the genuine social breastworks for various and more or less highly-tinctured lapses, thus foregathered in response to an instinct of gregariousness—an instinct around which the "birds of a feather" aphorism no doubt was framed. Having no choice in the matter, these persons were willing to accept the shadow for the reality. It might almost be said that on every uptown square of New York there is at least one common meeting point for similar assemblages of social exiles. Nearly all of the figurantes in Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening affairs were divorcées of more or less note; the "cases" of some of whom had been blazoned in huge red block type in the yellow newspapers, and "illustrated," in default of genuine portraits, with blurred "cuts" of no less benevolent or redoubtable females than the late Mrs. Pinkham or Carrie Nation. The men in the company who had not already rocketed through the divorce court were willing, it appeared from their frank method of expressing themselves, to make that by no means perilous passage; though there was a sprinkling of younger men, still factors in a social world from which there are no voluntary expatriates, who attended Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening affairs in a spirit of larkishness and glad of the chance to forsake, for a little while, regions more austere and still under the domination of at least a tacit repression.
For the rest, there were poetasters who fidgetted until they were called upon, out of pure sympathy, to read their own verse—some of the latter obviously "lifted;" temperamental musicians, male and female, who preferred to sway at or with their instruments with the rooms darkened while they performed; manufacturers and proselytizers of personally-conducted and generally quite unintelligible cults, physical, moral or ethical, all of the cults extending a maximum of "freedom of action" to the individual; devisers of impromptu or extemporaneous religions or near-religions, none of which boasted so inconvenient a restriction as a Decalogue; fashionable or striving-to-be-fashionable palmists and chiromancers, "swamis," "yogis;" burnoosed, sullen, white-robed exploiters, from the Near or Far East, of women who mistook their advanced symptoms of neuresthenia for a hankering for the occult; and the other unclassified, sycophantic factors of a "Bohemianism" whose seams were perfectly visible to the naked eye and whose sawdust was only held in place with the all-together co-operation of the whole artificial assemblage.
Louise's entrance upon the scene created a stir which caused her to feel distinctly uncomfortable. She longed for Laura; but Laura had "sworn off" attending Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening parties; not from any selfish motives of caution—for Laura was in keen demand in the social circle in which she had been born and reared; but simply because she had at length ceased to extract amusement from the self-idolizing vagaries of Mrs. Treharne's crew; more briefly still, because they bored her to extinction.
When the word was buzzed around among the slowly-moving, chattering assemblage to whom the entire lower floor of the house, including the conservatory, had been thrown open—that "the tall girl with the air and the hair" was Mrs. Treharne's daughter—the more privileged ones adverted to their hostess as Tony—there was a sudden cluttering of the passageways leading to the room in which Louise was standing with her mother. In their keenness to catch a glimpse of the "just-bloomed daughter of Tony" many of them even forsook the long and generously-provided buffet, than which no greater sign of a consuming interest or curiosity could be given; for not a few of the raffish guests appeared to be so patently in need of nourishment—and stimulant—that they spent the major portion of the evening at the buffet.
A woman whose vision seemed to be slightly filmed from her inordinate devotion to the punch lifted her glass, after studying Louise in a sort of open-mouthed daze for a moment or so, and sang out, in a tone that she apparently had some difficulty in controlling:
"To Tony's daughter—the Empress Louise!"
The men and women in her neighborhood grabbed for glasses to fill from the punchbowls and took up the refrain:
"The Empress Louise!"