I met Grace Morris for the first time at Mrs. Hatfield's musical tea—a unique affair at which the half-dozen world-famous artists our hostess had engaged for the afternoon strove vainly to make their music heard above the care-free voices of her guests. I had isolated myself behind a potted palm in the great music-room, and was trying to distinguish the strains of Mischa Elman's playing from the conversational high notes around me when a deprecating little laugh sounded in my ear.
"It's no use," said a clear, languid young voice. "We might as well chat, too. But first do rise on your toes, look over the purple plume on the fat woman's hat, and catch one glimpse of Elman's expression! He thinks we're all insane, or that he is."
I did not follow this stimulating suggestion. Instead I looked at the speaker. She was a typical New York society girl of twenty-three, or possibly twenty-four, dressed to perfection and bored to extinction, her pale, pretty features stamped with the avid expression of the chronic seeker of new sensations.
"You're Miss Iverson, aren't you?" she went on, when I had smiled my acknowledgment of her swift service across the conversational net. "My brother pointed you out to me at the theater the other night. He wants us to meet. He's one of your editors on the Searchlight, you know—Godfrey Morris."
In another minute we were chatting with as little compunction as the ruthless throng around us, and while we talked I studied Miss Morris. I knew a great deal about her. She had only recently returned from Germany, where for two years she had been studying singing with Lehmann. She had an exquisite voice, and, though it was understood that she would make no professional use of it, she had already sung at several concerts given in behalf of charities that appealed to her. She possessed a large fortune, inherited from her grandfather; her brother Godfrey had inherited one of equally impressive proportions, but its coming had not interrupted the daily and nightly grind of his editorial work. Evidently the Morrises, despite their languid air, sprang from energetic stock. It was whispered that Miss Morris's energies occasionally lent themselves to all-night tango parties, and late suppers with Bohemian friends in operatic and dramatic worlds whose orbits hardly touched the exclusive one in which she dwelt; but thus far there had been nothing more significant than a few raised eyebrows to emphasize this gossip.
"I'm lucky to meet you," she ran on now. "It saves writing a note. Mother and I want you to dine with us Thursday evening of next week, at our hotel. We haven't gone to housekeeping. We're at the Berkeley for the winter, because Godfrey has an apartment there. Can you come?—I'm so glad. At eight, then."
A ravishing strain of music reached us. Simultaneously the voice of the fat woman with the purple plume uttered the final notes of the recital she had been pouring into the ears of the acquaintance on her left. "Then, and not till then," she shouted, "I found that the unhappy woman lived on the West Side!"
Miss Morris's eyes and mine exchanged a look that carried us a long way forward on the road of friendship.
"I wouldn't miss these musicales for the world," she murmured. "Isn't Mrs. Hatfield unique? Look at her now, out in the dining-room, putting a layer of French pastry over Amato's perfectly good voice! He won't be able to sing for a week. Oh, Elman has finished. Do you know him? No? Then come and meet him."
Miss Morris interested me, and I was sorry to say good-by to her when we parted, and genuinely disappointed when I reached the Berkeley the following Thursday night, to learn that she was not to be with us at dinner. Her mother lost no time in acquainting me with this distressing fact.