From the hall there came loud laughter, with sounds of scuffling, and cries, “Let me have it!”—“That’s Baby de Mille,” said Miss Wyman. “She’s always wanting to rough-house it. Robbie was mad the last time she was down here; she got to throwing sofa-cushions, and upset a vase.”
“Isn’t that supposed to be good form?” asked Montague.
“Not at Robbie’s,” said she. “Have you had a chance to talk with Robbie yet? You’ll like him—he’s serious, like you.”
“What’s he serious about?”
“About spending his money,” said Betty. “That’s the only thing he has to be serious about.”
“Has he got so very much?”
“Thirty or forty millions,” she replied; “but then, you see, a lot of it’s in the inner companies of his railroad system, and it pays him fabulously. And his wife has money, too—she was a Miss Mason, you know, her father’s one of the steel crowd. We’ve a saying that there are millionaires, and then multi-millionaires, and then Pittsburg millionaires. Anyhow, the two of them spend all their income in entertaining. It’s Robbie’s fad to play the perfect host—he likes to have lots of people round him. He does put up good times—only he’s so very important about it, and he has so many ideas of what is proper! I guess most of his set would rather go to Mrs. Jack Warden’s any day; I’d be there to-night, if it hadn’t been for Ollie.”
“Who’s Mrs. Jack Warden?” asked Montague.
“Haven’t you ever heard of her?” said Betty. “She used to be Mrs. van Ambridge, and then she got a divorce and married Warden, the big lumber man. She used to give ‘boy and girl’ parties, in the English fashion; and when we went there we’d do as we please—play tag all over the house, and have pillow-fights, and ransack the closets and get up masquerades! Mrs. Warden’s as good-natured as an old cow. You’ll meet her sometime—only don’t you let her fool you with those soft eyes of hers. You’ll find she doesn’t mean it; it’s just that she likes to have handsome men hanging round her.”
At one o’clock a few of Robbie’s guests went to bed, Montague among them. He left two tables of bridge fiends sitting immobile, the women with flushed faces and feverish hands, and the men with cigarettes dangling from their lips. There were trays and decanters beside each card-table; and in the hall he passed three youths staggering about in each other’s arms and feebly singing snatches of “coon songs.” Ollie and Betty had strolled away together to parts unknown.