Things was just in this shape, with bitterness on every side and old friends not speaking, and the opposition passing the Bohemians on the street with the frown of moral disgust, and no one knowing how it would all end, when I hear that Cora Wales has a niece coming from New York to visit her—a Miss Smith. I says to myself, "My lands! Here's another Miss Smith from New York when it looks to me like the one we got is giving us a plenty of the big league stuff." But I meet Cora Wales and learn that this one's first name is Dulcie, which again seemed to make a difference.
Cora says this Dulcie niece is one of New York's society leaders and she's sorry she invited her, because what kind of a town is it in which to introduce a pure young girl that never smoked or drank in her life and whose people belong to one of the very most exclusive churches in the city. She had hoped to give Dulcie a good time, but how can she sully herself with any of our young people that have took up Bohemianism? She being fresh from her social triumphs in New York, where her folks live in one of the very most fashionable apartment houses on Columbus Avenue, right in the centre of things and next to the elevated railway, will be horrified at coming to a town where society seems to be mostly a little group of people who do things they hadn't ought to.
Dulcie is a dear girl and very refined, everything she wears being hand embroidered, and it would of been a good chance for Red Gap to get acquainted with a young society girl of the right sort, but with this scandal tearing up the town it looks like the visit will be a failure for all parties.
I tell Cora on the contrary it looks like a good chance to recall the town to its better self. If this here Dulcie is all that is claimed for her she can very probably demolish the Latin Quarter and have us all leading correct society lives in no time, because the public is fickle and ever ready for new stuff, and as a matter of fact I suspect the Latin Quarter is in a bad way because of everything in town of an illegal character having been drunk up by the comrades. Me? I was trying to get some new life into the fight, understand, being afraid it would die natural and leave us to a dull winter.
Cora's eyes lighted up with a great hope and she beat it off to the Recorder office to have a piece put in the paper about Dulcie's coming. It was a grand piece, what with Cora giving the points and Edgar Tomlinson writing it. It said one of Gotham's fair daughters would winter in our midst, and how she was a prominent society leader and an ornament of the fast hunting set, noted for her wit and beauty and dazzling costumes, and how a series of brilliant affairs was being planned in her honour by her hostess and aunt, Mrs. Leonard Wales, Red Gap's prominent society matron and representative of all that was best in our community, who would entertain extensively at her new and attractive home in Price's Addition. And so forth.
I'm bound to say it created a flurry of interest among the younger dancing set, and more than one begun to consider whether they would remain loyal to Bohemia or plunge back into society once more, where stockings are commonly wore, and smoking if done at all is hurriedly sneaked through out on the porch or up in the bathroom.
From Cora's description I was all prepared to find Dulcie a tall, stately creature of twenty-eight, kind of blase and haggard from her wearing social duties in New York. But not so. Not so at all. Cora had invitations out for a tea the day after Dulcie come; invitations, that is, to the non-Bohemians and such as had reformed or give good signs of it. I don't know which head I got in under. And this Dulcie niece was nothing but a short, fat, blond kid of seventeen or eighteen that had never led any society whatever. You could tell that right quick.
She was rapidly eating cream-cheese sandwiches when I was presented to her. I knew in one look that society had never bothered Dulcie any. Victuals was her curse. In the cattle business it ain't riding disrespectful horses that gets you the big money; it's being able to guess weights. And if Dulcie pulled a pound less than one hundred and eighty then all my years of training has gone for naught. She was certainly big-framed stock and going into the winter strong. Between bites of sandwich, with a marshmallow now and then, she was saying that she was simply crazy about the war, having the dandiest young French soldier for a godson and sending him packages of food and cigarettes constantly, and all the girls of her set had one, and wasn't it the darlingest idea.
And her soldier was only twenty-two, though his beard made him look more mature, and he wrote such dandy letters, but she didn't suppose there would ever be anything between them because papa was too busy with his coal yard to take her over there.
As the girl chattered on it didn't seem to me that our Latin Quarter was in the slightest danger from her. Still, some of the girls that was there seemed quite impressed or buffaloed by her manner. One idea she give out now was new in Red Gap. She had all her rings named after meals. She had a breakfast ring and a dinner ring and a supper ring and a banquet ring, and Daisy Estelle Maybury admired the necklace she had on, and Dulcie said that was a mere travelling necklace; and how did they like this cute little restaurant frock she was wearing? A little dressmaker over on Amsterdam Avenue had turned it out. All the parties she dealt with, apparently, was little. She had a little dressmaker and a little hair woman and a little manicure and a little florist, and so forth. She'd et five cream-cheese sandwiches by this time, in spite of its being quite painful for her to pick up a dropped napkin. Dulcie didn't fold over good. You could tell here was a girl that had never tried to get away from it all. She wanted to be right where it was.