first hand; but then, Vic has told me
a lot, and I have heard Stan and Loveland talk; besides, one seems to
know one's own country and country people by instinct without having
actually to see what they do; and I'm sure that even in the smartest
set at home they don't dream of bothering their heads to think of such
original entertainments as in America.

In England there are just two or three kinds of parties. You give a
crush, which is grand if you have a big house, or you ask a few bright,
particular ones and enjoy yourself. Or in the country you have a house
party, and pick out the men because they can shoot and the women
because they are pretty; or else, if it's winter, you hunt and you have
theatricals. But the Americans at Newport turn up their noses at that
slow, old-fashioned kind of thing. They lie awake nights (I'm sure they
must) to think of something so original that nobody else can ever have
had anything the least like it before. It is better, too, to have it
very sensational and startling. If you are invited to a party, you
never know a bit what it will be like; whether you will dance in a
barn, and eat your supper on horseback out of decorated mangers;
whether there will be captive balloons at a garden party; whether a
Noah's Ark will have been rigged up on a miniature lake, or whether you
will have a pair of skates provided for you and find yourself cutting
figures on the ice in a gorgeously illuminated skating-rink, with the
thermometer up to goodness knows how many degrees outside.

Of course, in a place where everybody gets nervous prostration trying
to outdo everybody else in originality and extravagance, it wouldn't be
like Mrs. Ess Kay to let herself fall behind.

She simply made up her mind that her big entertainment should be _the_
affair of the season, before she decided what form it should take. She
thought instead of sleeping, for several nights, and began to wear the
expression on her face which I have in motor cars when I think we are
going to telescope with something twice our size, and am trying to
prepare for eternity with a pleasant smile on my lips. She ate scarcely
anything, telephoned a good deal, and took phenacetin in hot milk.
Then, suddenly, it came to her;--I mean the Idea.

We were at lunch when she thought of it, and luckily there were no
visitors except Mrs. Pitchley and Carolyn, Mohunsleigh, and Tom
Doremus. It was bad enough even with them, for she half sprang up, then
s