Cornelia was in the habit of getting up somewhere between nine and eleven. After breakfast, the two friends would set out to look for a job. The spirit in which they proceeded was the spirit in which young people go skylarking. Hunting for a job was an old pastime of Cornelia's. If she ever came up to a job's requirements, the job never came up to hers. Or if by chance it did, she discovered a bewildering array of reasons for not taking it, or for speedily leaving it, when taken.
At noon, the day's duty was considered fully done. After lunch, there was another jaunt; this time to an art gallery, concert hall, theatre or movie. Free tickets from Cornelia's theatrical friends were reasonably plentiful, and when these failed, there were return calls to pay.
Thus, Charlotte Beecher's studio was a favorite stopping place, as Janet soon discovered. Charlotte possessed a million dollars or more in her own right, and she had three or four studios in totally different parts of the city. She did her hardest work in her double Lorillard flat every morning; her evenings were spent warding off fortune-hunting suitors like Denman Page, who besieged her Fifth Avenue apartment; on certain afternoons she served an "intellectual tea" in a studio sumptuously fitted up in Washington Mews.
Janet was always taken to the studio de luxe in the Mews. Cornelia, invariably busy, would be sketching some new design of a hat, or pinning together a one-piece dress, whilst she luxuriated happily amidst the rich Chinese rugs and the soft silken cushions of Charlotte's show room. The serpent in this garden of Eden was the "little group of serious thinkers" (an element alien to Kips Bay) that met in the Mews by virtue of Charlotte's encouragement.
"These intellectuals!" Cornelia would say scornfully to Janet on the way home. "Did you ever hear such bumptious talk?"
"I find them rather amusing," Janet would perhaps reply.
"Araminta, what nonsense! They positively put the furniture on edge. But that's Charlotte all over. There's a nigger in every woodpile, and there's a jarring note in every one of Charlotte's rooms. My dear, it bores me cruelly."
Still, Cornelia went on visiting the Mews, intellectuals, cruel boredom, and all. It puzzled Janet for a time. She had still to learn that a perfect Kipsite is prepared to suffer no end of martyrdom in the sacred cause of luxury.
Every evening was like a new party to Janet, flat Number Fifteen being one of the chief rendezvous in the tenements. After supper, visitors of both sexes dropped in unannounced and uninvited, until by midnight, a dozen people, more or less, were sure to be occupying the whole flat.
Generally, the guests split up into small groups and spent the time in play. Some played at dancing or at music, others at clever repartee or giddy flirting. To this play, the counterpoint was enthusiasm. A magnificent enthusiasm for self. In a rapturous torrent of words, each Kipsite painted a roseate future that led by startling steps to a supreme moment in which the world lay prostrate at the enthusiast's feet.