Denver, where we stopped merely for luncheon, is far too important a city to mention in a brief paragraph or two, and is for that reason left out altogether.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE CITY OF RECKLESSNESS
“For West is West, and East is East, and never twain shall meet”—except in Colorado Springs!
Mountains, plains, squatters’ shanties, replicas of foreign palaces, cowboys, Indians, ranchers, New Yorkers, Londoners. The free open-air life and altitude of the plains, the sheltered luxurious manners and customs of the idle rich! Across the warp of Western characteristics is woven the woof of a cosmopolitan society.
Before coming here I had imagined the place a sort of huge sanatorium. I had expected long lines of invalid chairs on semi-enclosed verandas, even beds possibly, as in the outdoor wards of hospitals. I knew, of course, that there were good hotels and many private houses; and having friends who had come out here, I thought perhaps we might take luncheon or dinner with them in a quiet, semi-invalid sort of way—an early simple supper, and someone to tell us not to stay too long for fear of tiring Jim or Mary.
As a matter of fact Mary drove her own motor up to the hotel ten minutes after we arrived, and, telling us of half a dozen engagements that she had made for us, including a dinner that she was giving that evening, wanted us to come out to polo then and there.
Hadn’t she better rest? Not a bit of it!
Instead of the invalid regimen that we expected to fall into, we were kept going at a pace we could scarcely catch up with. We dined in extravagantly appointed houses, lunched on terraces overlooking gardens, danced into the first hours of the morning, and led the life typical of any fashionable pleasure resort. Of invalidism there was, on the surface, not a trace. Mary herself had come out a few years ago very ill, and Jim and L——, two men who had been sent away from home in an almost dying condition, seemed quite as unlike invalids as Mary. L—— has a beautiful house, run exactly as his establishment in Newport used to be, and he leads much the same life that he used to lead there. Motoring takes the place of yachting; he plays poker, polo, and golf, and dines rather much, wines rather more, and has changed not at all.
Jim, not because he is different, but only because he is less rich, lives in a little bungalow in Broadmoor. Instead of three or four footmen standing in the hall, as in L.’s house, Jim lives alone with a Jap boy who is cook, butler, valet, housemaid and nurse combined, but he gave us a delicious luncheon to which he had asked a few of his neighbors.