His hospitality, dispensed through her, was almost boundless, and there are those who say that there was method in that gathering, and that many a serious public question was discussed within the confines of those gorgeously upholstered rooms.
Give a man the proper seat at the right kind of a table, beside a woman who is beautiful, charming and magnetic, serve him with a perfect dinner, with good wine selected by a connoisseur, then after the dessert provide him with a cigar which cannot be bought in the open market, and it is almost a sure thing that, if you have any proposition to make, your battle is half won. What an ideal spot for lawyers, politicians and capitalists to discuss things that it wouldn’t do to have the public know.
And as the months rolled by this woman came to be known by the majority of prominent men of New York.
Now you can get a good look at her as she stops to glance in that window.
Not to have been her guest was to have missed a lot in life, and when you lost to her in a little poker game you were almost sorry your losses were not heavier.
She had more diamond rings than she could wear at any one time, and she had the best wardrobe in town. No matter what she saw and wanted it was hers. She scarcely needed to ask for it—she just wished, and it came as though she had been blessed with some fairy godmother who waved a magic wand, and brought things on the wind.
So there’s the picture, painted in the most ordinary colors, and there’s the woman, who grew to think the world was made for her to play with and do with as she liked.
When she was at the height of her career, this lawyer-political friend of hers—this champion and provider—really and truly fell in love. He was well past middle age, but that made no difference. After many years of waiting—years which were punctuated with numerous affairs which he thought spelled love—he found the girl at last in the daughter of a man whose position left him nothing to wish for. She was a society girl and charming enough for any man.
Before he fully realized what he was doing he had proposed marriage to her and had been accepted without giving that other one a thought.
When he understood that he had to break with her, he knew that he had the job of his life in front of him, but he was game enough to go at it without a moment’s hesitancy, and so one night, after the crowd had gone and the last poker chip cashed in, he told her the story.