We entered the house through a canvassed tunnel and inserted ourselves into a room packed with women and reverberating with a clamor of voices. We had a word and a hurried handclasp with Madge Knowlton and her daughter, and then were caught in a surging mass of humanity and carried into a room beyond. The jam was even closer here. I dodged a long hatpin, and was borne back against a mantelpiece banked with flowers whose delicate dying breath mingled with the scents of food and French perfumery. When the mass broke apart I had momentary glimpses of a glittering table with a woman at either end who was pouring liquid into cups.
At intervals the crowd, governed by some unknown law, was seized by migratory impulses. Segments of it separated from the rest, and drove toward the door. Here they met other entering segments with a resultant congestion. When thus solidified the only humans who seemed to have the key of breaking us loose were waiters. They found their way along the line of least resistance, making tortuous passages like the cracks in an ice pack.
From them we snatched food. I had a glass of punch, a cup of coffee, a chocolate cake, two marrons and a plate of lobster Neuberg, in the order named. I haven’t the slightest idea why I ate them—suggestion I suppose. All the other women were similarly endangering their lives, and the one possible explanation is that we communicated to one another the same suicidal impulse. It was like the early Christians going to the lions, the bold ones swept the weaker along by the contagion of example.
I met several old acquaintances who cried as if in rapturous delight.
“Why, Evelyn Drake, is this really you?”
“Evie—I can’t believe my eyes! I thought you had gone to Europe and died there.”
“How delightful to see you again. Living out of town, I suppose. We must arrange a meeting when I get time.”
And so forth and so on.
It made me feel like a resurrected ghost who had come to revisit the glimpses of the moon. My old place was not vacant, it was filled up and the grass was growing over it. I was glad when one of those blind stampeding impulses seized the crowd and carried me near enough to Betty to cry, as I was borne along, “I’m going home and I’d rather walk,” and was swept like a chip on a stream to the door.
It was raining, a thin icy drizzle. Beyond the thronging line of limousines, the streets were dark with patches of gilding where the lamplight struck along the wet asphalt. They looked like streets in dreams, mysteriously black gullies down which hurried mysteriously black figures. I walked toward Lexington Avenue, drooping and depressed, in accord with the chill night and the small sad noises of the rain. I was in that mood when you walk slowly, knowing your best dress is getting damp and feeling the moisture through your best shoes and neither matters. Nothing matters.