e graceful _diablerie_ in imagined situations on
the stage was equalled only by her roguish effrontery in more real, if
hardly less public situations off, played up to the affluent
_amateur_--patron of all arts that require an unblushing cooeperation
from pretty young women. There, in short, all were welcome who liked the
game and were not hampered in playing it by dull inhibitions, material
or immaterial. It was Bohemia _de luxe_--Bohemia in the same sense that
Marie Antoinette's dairy-farm was Arcady.

That Susan--given her doting guardian, her furs, her Chow, her
shadowy-gleaming, imaginative charm, her sharp audacities of
speech--would bring a new and seductive personality to this perpetual
carnival was Maltby's dream; she was predestined--he had long suspected
the tug of that fate upon her--to shine there by his side. He best could
offer the cup, and her gratitude for its heady drafts of life would be
merely his due. It was an exciting prospect; it promised much; and it
only remained to intoxicate Susan with the wine of an unguessed freedom.
This, Maltby fondly assured himself, would prove no difficult task. Life
was life, youth was youth, joy was joy; their natural affinities were
all on his side and would play into his practiced hands.

Doubtless Phil and I must have agreed with him--from how differently
anxious a spirit!--but all three of us would then have proved quite
wrong. To intoxicate Susan, Maltby did find a difficult, in the end an
impossible, task. He took her--not unwilling to enter and appraise any
circle from high heaven to nether hell--to all the right, magical
places, exposed her to all the heady influences of his world; and she
found them enormously stimulating--to her sense of the ironic. Maltby's
sensuous, quick-witted friends simply would not come true for Susan when
she first moved among them; they were not serious about anything but
refined sensation and she could not take their refined sensations
seriously; but for a time they amused her, and she relished them much as
Charles Lamb relished the belles and rakes of Restoration Drama: "They
are a world of themselves almost as much as fairyland."

To their intimate dinners, their intimate musical evenings, their
intimate studio revels--she came on occasion with Maltby as to a play:
"altogether a speculative scene of things." She could, in those early
weeks, have borrowed Lamb's words for her own comedic detachment: "We
are amongst a chaotic pe