Our Talk Over Tea
Mrs. Radigan untwisted her furs and laid her muff and gloves on the chair at her side, and proceeded to make tea.
"Well," she said, when the water was boiling industriously and the alcohol lamp had ceased its explosions, "I have just leased a cottage for the coming season at Newport. We are going quietly, you know, and it's just a tiny little box on Bellevue Avenue and only costs us $12,000 a year."
"Indeed?" said I. "How sensible!"
"I think it is sensible," said Mrs. Radigan. "Now, John in his usual way wanted to take the Mints' villa at $40,000 for the season, but I said no—people would say we were nouveaux riches, and I prefer to live quietly and modestly. It is so much better taste. So many people get in nowadays on their mere money."
Mrs. Radigan heaved a sigh. She made me some brackish-looking tea, more for herself, and over her cup she eyed me archly. Just a week before she had sat there with me over her afternoon tea wondering whether Society would come to her ball, or she would be doomed to move in the Waldorf-Astoria set for the rest of her existence. Now she was so firmly established that she could rail, because in so doing she was acting the dual rôle of the attacker and the attacked. I showed no surprise. She had long since ceased to astonish me.
"So many common people go to Newport thinking they can buy their way in," Mrs. Radigan went on. "They rent great houses and they give balls, they entertain a German baron or a Hindoo prince, and nobody pays any attention to them. They disappear next year. Sometimes they are barred because there is a scandal in the family, like a divorce."