ned, it was said, had give Luella a good licking
for smoking cigarettes, and old Jesse Himebaugh had threatened his
daughter Gussie with the reform school if she didn't stop trying to get
away from it all. Even Beryl Mae's aunt put her foot down. Beryl Mae met
me in the post office one day and says auntie won't let her be a Bohemian
any more, having threatened to take her new ukulele away from her if she
goes to that Latin Quarter another single time; and poor Beryl Mae having
hoped to do a Hawaiian dance in native costume for the intimate theatre,
where it wouldn't be misunderstood!

Things was just in this shape, with bitterness on every side and old
friends not speaking, and the opposition passing the Bohemians on the
street with the frown of moral disgust, and no one knowing how it would
all end, when I hear that Cora Wales has a niece coming from New York to
visit her--a Miss Smith. I says to myself, "My lands! Here's another Miss
Smith from New York when it looks to me like the one we got is giving us
a plenty of the big league stuff." But I meet Cora Wales and learn that
this one's first name is Dulcie, which again seemed to make a difference.

Cora says this Dulcie niece is one of New York's society leaders and
she's sorry she invited her, because what kind of a town is it in which
to introduce a pure young girl that never smoked or drank in her life and
whose people belong to one of the very most exclusive churches in the
city. She had hoped to give Dulcie a good time, but how can she sully
herself with any of our young people that have took up Bohemianism? She
being fresh from her social triumphs in New York, where her folks live
in one of the very most fashionable apartment houses on Columbus Avenue,
right in the centre of things and next to the elevated railway, will
be horrified at coming to a town where society seems to be mostly a
little group of people who do things they hadn't ought to.

Dulcie is a dear girl and very refined, everything she wears being
hand embroidered, and it would of been a good chance for Red Gap to get
acquainted with a young society girl of the right sort, but with this
scandal tearing up the town it looks like the visit will be a failure
for all parties.

I tell Cora on the contrary it looks like a good chance to recall the
town to its better self. If this here Dulcie is all that is claimed for
her she can very probably demolish the Latin Quarter and have us all
leading correc