Edith and John: A Story of Pittsburgh

by Franklin Smith Farquhar

Miss Edith turned to him, with pretended hautiness, and should liked to have said, "Impudence," but forbore that unlady-like expression in deference to her own good breeding. She was relieved, however, from making any answer to him by Mr. Cobb, who arose at that critical moment and announced, most graciously and grandiloquently, that the table would be cleared of the women and menu to make way for cigars and wine.

All of which orders being carried into execution, as per custom, the waiters proceeded to serve those two refreshing desserts. They sat long over their cigars, and longer over their wine—till the air was an ultramarine blueness, and the men in tipsy joyousness.

Mr. Monroe was very thirsty, it turned out, from the number of glasses that he drained, which had an happy effect upon him. For, with the disappearance of the wine down his esophagus, came a set grin on his face, akin to the smile of a disgruntled ghost. Young Cobb, aside from smoking enormously, imbibed freely, much against his personal appearance and qualifications to enter much farther into the pleasures of the evening. All the other gentlemen, including old man Cobb, entered into the libations with rare partiality—except Mr. Jarney, who, it was seen, refrained from participating in the dispatching of the invigorating liquor, a constitutional habit with him. This trait was looked upon by his now inebriating friends as a high breach of etiquette in not sipping wine after breaking bread at the home of a friend, and was an affront not to be condoned on such an occasion. But Mr. Jarney, while not approving of such bacchanalian practices, as far as he and his family were concerned, looked askance at them, so long as they were confined to others, and he made no protest.

After the free lubrication of their unsettled nerves and muddled heads, the men arose to join the ladies, who in the meantime had dressed for the ball, now to follow.

When all was in readiness and the band had struck up a softly insinuating waltz, Mr. and Mrs. Cobb wheeled out on the floor and glided around the room with the agility of two sixteen-year-olds. Mr. and Mrs. Jarney came after them, stately and graceful in their evolutions. Then came the ghost—Monroe—looking like a piece of burning asbestos, as a result of the wine, with his arm around the waist of Miss Edith. Then came young Cobb, whispering words of foolishness into the ear of Miss Barton, as they went round and round in a delirious whirl—to him. Then came all the other ladies and gentlemen, the latter suffering wondrously in the advanced stage of booziness. No, we will not cast all the shame upon the men in their journey of giddiness, for some of the bewitching woman, ah, and even unbewitching, too, presumed it their blessed privilege to partake of a little of the tonic of joy, as an equalizer to the wabbling motions of their husbands or friends.

Number after number, in this wise, was pulled off, each time the bibbers adding more and more wine as a wash down after each exhausting exhibition. So in consequence, after awhile, man after man began to fall by the wayside, and call feebly upon the good Samaritan: Bromo-seltzer, or bromo-something else: to keep them in condition to continue the mad seance. But the little imp Wine, once he secrets himself in the corpuscles of the blood, is a pretty difficult being to placate in so short a time. Not satisfied was he in laying hold of the faultless gentlemen in spike-tailed coats and immaculate bosoms, sparkling with all the iridescence of the purchasing power of money, but he sought out some of the decolleted dames and gauzyed damsels, and enveloped them in his opiatic arms. Even Mr. and Mrs. Cobb were not spared from his envelopment; for, after the fourth set, they became so maudlin in their hilarity that the sober servants were called upon to lead them out of the ballroom, from which they went, in a great state of regal debility, into the seclusion of their own bedchamber, there to sleep away their Thanksgiving potation.

And it was not long till every corner in the house had a sleeper languishing in the happy shades of somnolence. Mr. Monroe, the astute ghost of quietness, after cavorting for a considerable time like a nanny goat in a field of crimson clover, was among the first to succumb to the silencing influence of the giver of potency, and disappeared, like a settling stone, into a whirlpool of revelry. And young Jasper Cobb, the gay and handsome son of the Thanksgiving father and mother, after cutting capers that would put to ignominious flight a colored gen'man at a cake walk, gave up the contest at last and became numbered among the recumbent forms that rested, like so many babes in the woods, along the walls.

You are not supposed to believe that the Jarneys witnessed all these antics of the merry makers at this party, to which a half column space in the society page of the Sunday newspapers was devoted. No, you are not to believe they remained, retaining all their senses, to witness this pyretic debauch of high society. The truth is, that the Jarneys came as a matter of form in deference to Mr. Cobb, one of the high-ups in business; and they left in deference to their conscience and self-respect. The fact is, that after the second number was rendered, Mr. and Mrs. Jarney, seeing how things were going, and also at the solicitation of Miss Edith, took their ward, Star Barton, and repaired to their home.

"Well, how do you like high society?" asked Edith, when she and Star had reached their boudoir for a short lounging before going to bed.

"If that party is a fair sample, I don't like it," emphatically answered Star. "Why, it is no more respectable, if half as much, with all their fine things and glitter, than some of the hoe-downs in Hell's Half Acre."