Miss Bumpschus is very smart. Besides, she is intellectual. The Bumpschuses have been prominent in New York society for fifty years; one of her cousins married the Duke of Nothingham, and she is herself rated at some ten millions. So, really, Mrs. Radigan was doing me a favor and giving me what she called an opportunity. Then if I wanted to rest my eyes I could gaze on the lovely Miss Veal across the table, smiling at Willie Lite, and saying, "Indeed." Miss Bumpschus, I found, was religious. To her the world was peopled with only two sets of people worth knowing—the very rich and the very poor. She would cut one of the Rollers Club fellows dead in the street, but she would, with her own hands, bake a cake for one of those dear old friends of hers at the Home for Aged Elevated Ticket-choppers. If she had not been born just what she was, the heiress to the great Bumpschus fortune, she would far rather have been a nurse than a person merely well-to-do. But she was an accomplished talker, and though I cannot remember a thing she said, she left none of those dreadful pauses. For this I was grateful, anyway, as I could not break in on Mrs. Williegilt's engrossing discussion of glanders and carbureters with Radigan, nor on Mrs. Radigan's sermon on carbureters and glanders to Bobbie Williegilt; nor could I turn from Willie Lite the smile of Miss Veal. Anyway, whatever I said and whatever she said, Mrs. Radigan whispered in my ear as we were going down the steps to the wagon that I had won Miss Bumpschus's heart, and that if I would complete the conquest I must send my old dress-clothes and top hats to the aged ticket-choppers.
Mrs. Radigan has not yet learned that when you give theatre-parties in New York you must spend a week visiting the plays quietly if you are going to have young girls in the party. Miss Bumpschus is not young, but she is still classed as a girl, and, moreover, as I have said, she is puritanical. Of Miss Veal there was no real cause for fear. She smokes. But Mrs. Radigan informed us that she had chosen this particular play because she knew by the name that it was something Miss Bumpschus and her little sister could see. Poor Mrs. Radigan! Poor Miss Bumpschus! Really it was all harmless enough, but the underlying theme was not a burned will nor a stolen necklace. The play was more for bald heads and switches, like most of our up-to-date dramatic exhibitions, so Miss Bumpschus quickly lapsed into unconsciousness behind her programme, and Miss Veal looked as though it was all a mystery to her.
"It's just my luck," Mrs. Radigan groaned to me. "Now had she been Constance Wherry I should not have cared, but Ethel Bumpschus will not speak to me again. A woman is foolish nowadays who takes a party to see anything but Shakespeare, Ibsen, or the wax-works."
Rare sense is Mrs. Radigan beginning to show! Gleams of high intelligence break through occasionally. But I fear she exaggerated the effect on her younger guests. We did have to arouse Miss Bumpschus from behind her programme when the curtain went down, and when Willie Lite asked her if she did not think it was awfully clever, she turned to me and asked me not to forget the old clothes for the ticket-choppers. But she braced up at supper, and under the protection of Radigan, he being a married man, and the enlivening influences of a few glasses of champagne, she lost all her color again and became very chipper. I, for the moment, took on the character of a horse-doctor, and entertained Mrs. Williegilt with my opinions of glanders, while Williegilt basked in the light of Miss Veal's smiles, and Willie Lite laid the wires to sell a heavy line of champagne to our hostess. Altogether the evening was a success, particularly as I read in my paper the next morning that "Mr. and Mrs. J. John Radigan entertained Mr. and Mrs. Bobbie Q. Williegilt and several other smart people at dinner, the play, and supper last evening."
The Small Dance at Flurry's
By one bold leap Mrs. Radigan has landed herself among the smartest of the smart and has fixed herself there so firmly that heaven and earth cannot move her as long as she holds on to her money. She staked all and won. If she failed to become a smart woman, there was that dreadful alternative of being a club woman, but she risked it. She is safe now. Her husband can abscond or can sue for divorce, she can sue for divorce or can become totally demented, they can abandon each other and their son can abandon them, but as long as the great Radigan fortune hangs together they will be smart. And after all that adjective is not misused, for it is money that makes people interesting in this world. We will listen with bated breath to the twaddle of a multi-millionaire, while we would yawn in the face of a college professor. Everybody says the Radigans are interesting. Those who knew them in their poorer days must have thought them dull.
I said that Mrs. Radigan risked all. That is not exaggeration. When I heard how she had rented Flurry's entire establishment for an evening, and calmly sent out invitations to a dance, I shuddered.