rett was employed; though of course
it was impossible to speak of him to anyone except Vivace.

We lunched one day at an enormous and very fashionable red brick hotel
called the Waldorf-Astoria, and went into a Turkish Room, and had
delicious things to eat in a beautiful restaurant, which had not at all
an out-of-season air, though Mrs. Ess Kay said that most of the
well-groomed looking people whom I suspected of being leaders of the
Four Hundred were only "trippers." I do wonder, by the way, why one
always has an innate sense of contempt for trippers, and longs to be
sniffy and show one's own superiority? We must all be trippers
somewhere and sometimes, or we would never see anything of the world;
indeed I suppose I am by way of being a tripper now. But one never
seems to regard one's self in such a light, or imagine that anybody
else could be so undiscerning.

I hadn't known that a hotel could be as big as the Waldorf-Astoria,
though Mrs. Ess Kay says there are several just about as large in New
York, and she has heard there are one or two in Chicago, but she thanks
Heaven she doesn't know anything personally about _that_. When she made
this remark I remembered what Sally had told me in confidence about
Mrs. Ess Kay's life before she began to qualify for the Four Hundred.
But of course I did not make any allusion to the subject, for fear it
was a skeleton in her closet. And Sally says that well-regulated
Chicago people think New York a one-horse place compared to their town,
which is really wonderful and most interesting, as I shall find out if
I see it. I wish I could, but I suppose I shan't, as I came over to
visit Mrs. Ess Kay, not to do sight-seeing.

The second day after we came back from West Point, as I went downstairs
the first thing in the morning, I heard Mrs. Ess Kay at the telephone,
which is in a little room, along a corridor off the fountain court.

She was having a long conversation with someone, laughing and chatting
just as if she were talking to a visitor; and presently my name came
in. "Yes, Lady Betty Bu----, no, not pronounced that way, my child. As
if it were spelt B-U-C-K-, yes, that's right. Such a pretty girl, a
perfect dear. I expect the men will be wild about her at Newport.
Potter _raves_ over her. Ha, ha, ha! Do you think so? Well, perhaps.
I've known stranger things to happen. No, it's not her father, but her
brother, who's the Duke; awfully good-looking. I wish he could have
come too