For, many other men were just as often seen on parade in Elaine’s opera box. Senator Alynton, General Morehouse, U. S. A., Judge Arbuckle, and other social heavy guns oftener pressed the cushions of her victoria, or nestled under her sleigh robes.
The Lady of Lakemere’s dinners were always stocked with a half dozen masculine “lions” of deep-toned and majestic growl. There were also two or three society swells—“howling swells”—who represented the “froth and foam,” and these young men, with vacuous smiles and heaven-kissing collars, impartially formed the “bodyguard” at theatre parties, and a gilded Spartan band, deftly “cleaned up” the debris of the midnight spread in the Waldorf supper room.
Elaine had a peculiar fashion of segregating the lions and dudes, and sending each kind of social animal forth radiant with self-satisfaction, after a happy five minutes passed with her alone—in the pearl boudoir.
So, calm and serene, Harold Vreeland duly came and went. Men wondered that he so freely stood back to let “other fellows take up the running,” and Augustus Van Renslayer sagely summed up the verdict of the younger “women hunters” of New York: “He is no marrying man. He lives in an eternal picnic of his own—up there—in the Elmleaf.” It was vaguely understood that Sardanapalus was Vreeland’s patron saint, and Bacchus and Nero his household gods. The charm had worked but too well.
And the women of Gotham, those bright-eyed heart-wreckers, were all fain to agree with the catfish-eyed Van Renslayer. There was a fatal impartiality in the easy gallantry of the wary Princeton graduate.
Liberal, dashing, mindful of all the petits agrémens
, he was no woman’s slave—and yet, all women’s friend. If no single heart quivered at his master touch, still, there were many arms open to him selon son métier
. A fatal curiosity led many a pretty Columbus on voyages of discovery to the Elmleaf—whereat Bagley duly grinned.
That famous housewarming had been a marvel in its delicate recognition of the monde ou l’on s’ennuie, and the judicious hilarity of the Demi-Vierges.
For the return of Mr. James Potter, now finally severed from the flagging firm of Hathorn & Wolfe, had furnished Vreeland with a brilliant new idea.