Society knew Max, and many a woman had set her cap at him, hoping to capture the tall, well-set-up and easy-going young fellow, together with the ease and comfort which his substantial estates would afford.
Max, however, had done a few years of town life. He had become blasé and nauseated. Since he had met Marion Rolfe the quiet, modest, unassuming and hard-working shop-assistant, the haute monde bored him more than ever. He went only where he was compelled, yet he nowadays preferred the cheap Italian restaurant and Marion’s society to the tables of the rich with their ugly women striving to fascinate, and their small-talk of scandal, gossip and cruel innuendo.
There is surely no world in the world like that of London—nothing so complex, so tragic, and yet so grimly humorous, so soul-killing, and yet so reckless as our little, lax world of vanity and display that calls itself Society, the world which the nouveau riche are ever seeking to enter by the back-door, and which the suburbs rush to see portrayed upon the stage of the theatre.
Everywhere the manner and morals of Mayfair are aped nowadays. Mrs Browne-Smythe, the City clerk’s wife of tattling Tooting, has her “day,” and gives her bridge-parties just as does the Duchess of Dorsetshire in Grosvenor Square; and Mrs Claude Greene, the wife of the wholesale butcher, who was once a barmaid near the Meat Market, and now lives in matrimonial felicity in cliquey Clapham, “requests the company of” upon the self-same cards and with the self-same formula as the wife of Jimmy James the South African magnate in Park Lane.
Max, glad that supper was over, rose and walked with his friend out into the big lounge where the Roumanian band were playing weird gipsy melodies, and sat at one of the little tables to smoke and sip Grand Marnier cordon rouge, being joined a few moments later by a couple of men whom he knew at the club, and who appeared to be at a loose end.
At last the lights were turned down as signal that in five minutes it would be closing time, and then rifling, Max, ignorant of the ingenious plot, invited his friend Adam round to Dover Street for a final smoke.