"Poor old Emerson," said Pendleton, looking after them. "He is all right at heart but such a blundering bounder. Among the men he can get along, but the women are a bit trying to him, I fancy."
"The Emersons must have climbed over the bars while I was away—how did they arrange it?" asked Sheldon Burgoyne, who had been abroad for the last three years.
"Easy. They have a very good looking daughter who went to Dobbs Ferry—she got to know the nice girls there and made good with them. Her mother has the social bee and is a schemer. Emerson has the requisite collateral and—attention to this part, please—he owned a bit of ground which the Country Club simply had to have, and he consented to sell it—if, and when, we would elect him to membership. Naturally, we elected."
"I see," mused Burgoyne, watching his cigarette smoke float lazily out the window.
"What do you see?" Devereux smiled.
"The usual thing. Father is impossible, but a good sort—mother is a pusher and, I dare say, fat—yes?—and daughter is not only a beauty but also something of a winner. Is she captured yet?"
"Not officially!" Pendleton answered; "but I understand that she is not without suitors," with a bit of a smile.
"With papa having the stuff! I reckon not, Malvolio," returned Burgoyne. "Give a woman money, and looks and some slight social position, and you can trust her for the rest—even if the boys are backward, which in this instance isn't likely."
"The Emersons are not the only 'new' ones the Club has admitted recently," Pendleton remarked.
"Not by several dozen, my friend!" exclaimed Devereux. "In ten years society will have passed from the control of those who are to those who weren't."