tional, they had
nothing to do with right or wrong: a fact which Mrs. Alden set forth
with her usual incisiveness. A woman, married or unmarried, might
travel with a man all over Europe, and every one might know that she
did it, but it would make no difference, so long as she did not do it
in America. There was one young matron whom Montague would meet, a
raging beauty, who regularly got drunk at dinner parties, and had to be
escorted to her carriage by the butler. She moved in the most exclusive
circles, and every one treated it as a joke. Unpleasant things like
this did not hurt a person unless they got "out"--that is, unless they
became a scandal in the courts or the newspapers. Mrs. Alden herself
had a cousin (whom she cordially hated) who had gotten a divorce from
her husband and married her lover forthwith and had for this been
ostracized by Society. Once when she came to some semi-public affair,
fifty women had risen at once and left the room! She might have lived
with her lover, both before and after the divorce, and every one might
have known it, and no one would have cared; but the convenances
declared that she should not marry him until a year had elapsed after
the divorce.

One thing to which Mrs. Alden could testify, as a result of a
lifetime's observation, was the rapid rate at which these conventions,
even the most essential of them, were giving way, and being replaced by
a general "do as you please." Anyone could see that the power of women
like Mrs. Devon, who represented the old regime, and were dignified and
austere and exclusive, was yielding before the onslaught of new people,
who were bizarre and fantastic and promiscuous and loud. And the
younger sets cared no more about anyone--nor about anything under
heaven, save to have a good time in their own harum-scarum ways. In the
old days one always received a neatly-written or engraved invitation to
dinner, worded in impersonal and formal style; but the other day Mrs.
Alden had found a message which had been taken from the telephone:
"Please come to dinner, but don't come unless you can bring a man, or
we'll be thirteen at the table."

And along with this went a perfectly incredible increase in luxury and
extravagance. "You are surprised at what you see here to-day," said
she--"but take my word for it, if you were to come back five years
later, you'd find all our present standards antiquated, and our present
pace-makers sent to the rear. You'd find n