ispered Irene
Paul,--"Our little Adelle is coming on." To which the California girl
replied with a chuckle,--"Didn't I tell you she was a good old sport?"
Adelle, overhearing this, felt an almost vivid sense of pride.
But as yet hers was only a very little air, which was quickly wilted by
the oppressive luxury of the Glynns' country-place--one of those large,
ostentatious establishments that Americans are wont to start before they
know how, and where consequently the elaborate domestic machinery
creaks. There were men-servants of different nationalities, ladies'
maids, and a houseful of guests coming and going as in a private hotel.
Adelle shrank into the obscurest corner and her anemonelike charm,
tentatively putting forth, was quite lost in the scramble. Beechwood was
a much less genial home than the slipshod Mexican hacienda of the
Mereldas and nobody paid any attention to the shy girl. Eveline Glynn,
who expected in another year to be free from school, was too much
occupied with her own flirtations to bother herself about her chance
guest. Adelle, being left to her usual occupation of silent observation,
managed to absorb a good deal at Beechwood in four days, chiefly of the
machinery of modern wealth. There were the elaborate meals, the
drinking, the card-playing, the motors, the innumerable servants, and
the sickening atmosphere of inane sentimentalism between the sexes.
Everybody seemed to be having "an affair," and the talk was redolent of
innuendo. Adelle had occasion to observe the potency of her lamp in this
society. She worked it first upon the waiting-woman assigned to her, to
whom she gave a large fee and who coached her devotedly in the ways of
the house and supplied her with the gossip. It also brought her the
annoying attentions of a middle-aged man, to whom her hostess had
confided that the dumb little Clark girl was "awful rich."
At the end of the visit the girls went back to New York, under the
chaperonage of "Rosy," to equip themselves for the school term, staying
at a great new hotel, and here Adelle's corruption by her wealth was
continued at an accelerated pace. The four girls flitted up and down the
Avenue, buying and ordering what they would. There were definite limits
to the purse of the Californians, but Adelle, perceiving the distinction
to be had from free spending, ordered with a splendid indifference to
price or amount. She won the admiration of her friends by the ease with
which she
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