“He wouldn’t get much with her: Creighton is in a tight place. He may pull out, but he has three children besides Mabel. However, there are plenty of others to snap at this titled fish, no doubt.”
“I hope not,” said Augusta. “Dear Mabel is very fond of him; I am sure of that. He only arrived to-day, and is going with them to the opera to-night. How are you to meet him?”
“Fletcher Cuyler will bring him to my box, of course. Are not all distinguished foreigners brought to my shrine at once?”
“True,” said Miss Forbes. “But are we going in to dinner? I have never heard Maurel in Don Giovanni, and I don’t want to lose more than the first act.”
“There is plenty of it. But let us go in to dinner, by all means.”
CHAPTER V.
The two tiers of boxes at the Metropolitan Opera House reserved for the beauty and fashion of New York flashed with the plumage of women and a thousand thousand gems. Women of superb style, with little of artifice but much of art, gowned so smartly that only their intense vitality saved them from confusion with the fashion-plate, carrying themselves with a royal, albeit somewhat self-conscious air, many of them crowned like empresses, others starred like night, producing the effect en masse of resplendent beauty, and individually of deficiency in all upon which the centuries have set their seal, hung, two or three in a frame, against the curving walls and red background of the great house: suspended in air, these goddesses of a new civilisation, as if with insolent challenge to all that had come to stare. To the music they paid no attention. They had come to decorate, not to listen; without them there would be no opera. The music lovers were stuffed on high, where they seemed to cling to the roof like flies. The people in the parquette and orchestra chairs, in the dress-circle and balconies, came to see the hundreds of millions represented in the grand tier. Two rows of blasé club faces studded the long omnibus box. Behind the huge sleeves and voluminous skirts that sheathed their proudest possessions, were the men that had coined or inherited the wealth which made this triumphant exhibition possible.
As the curtain went down on the second act and the boxes emptied themselves of their male kind that other male kind might enter to do homage, two young men took their stand in the back of a box near the stage and scanned the house. One of them remarked after a few moments:
“I thought that all American women were beautiful. So far, I see only one.”
“These are the New York fashionettes, my dear boy. Their pedigree is too short for aristocratic outline. You will observe that the pug is as yet unmitigated. Not that blood always tells, by any means: some of your old duchesses look like cooks. Our orchids travel on their style, grooming, and health, and you must admit that the general effect is stunning. Who is your beauty?”