t society lives in no time, because the public is fickle
and ever ready for new stuff, and as a matter of fact I suspect the Latin
Quarter is in a bad way because of everything in town of an illegal
character having been drunk up by the comrades. Me? I was trying to get
some new life into the fight, understand, being afraid it would die
natural and leave us to a dull winter.

Cora's eyes lighted up with a great hope and she beat it off to the
Recorder office to have a piece put in the paper about Dulcie's coming.
It was a grand piece, what with Cora giving the points and Edgar
Tomlinson writing it. It said one of Gotham's fair daughters would winter
in our midst, and how she was a prominent society leader and an ornament
of the fast hunting set, noted for her wit and beauty and dazzling
costumes, and how a series of brilliant affairs was being planned in her
honour by her hostess and aunt, Mrs. Leonard Wales, Red Gap's prominent
society matron and representative of all that was best in our community,
who would entertain extensively at her new and attractive home in Price's
Addition. And so forth.

I'm bound to say it created a flurry of interest among the younger
dancing set, and more than one begun to consider whether they would
remain loyal to Bohemia or plunge back into society once more, where
stockings are commonly wore, and smoking if done at all is hurriedly
sneaked through out on the porch or up in the bathroom.

From Cora's description I was all prepared to find Dulcie a tall,
stately creature of twenty-eight, kind of blase and haggard from her
wearing social duties in New York. But not so. Not so at all. Cora had
invitations out for a tea the day after Dulcie come; invitations, that
is, to the non-Bohemians and such as had reformed or give good signs of
it. I don't know which head I got in under. And this Dulcie niece was
nothing but a short, fat, blond kid of seventeen or eighteen that had
never led any society whatever. You could tell that right quick.

She was rapidly eating cream-cheese sandwiches when I was presented to
her. I knew in one look that society had never bothered Dulcie any.
Victuals was her curse. In the cattle business it ain't riding
disrespectful horses that gets you the big money; it's being able to
guess weights. And if Dulcie pulled a pound less than one hundred and
eighty then all my years of training has gone for naught. She was
certainly big-framed stock and going into the winter