During that first year Athalie Greensleeve saw a great deal of New
York society, professionally, and of many New York men, socially.
But the plaything which society attempted to make of her she gently
but adroitly declined to become. She herself drew this line whenever
it was necessary to draw it, never permitting herself to mistake the
fundamental attitude of these agreeable and amicably demonstrative
people toward her, or toward any girl who lived alone in New York and
who practised such a profession.
Not among the people who employed her and who paid her lavishly for an
evening's complacency; not among people who sought her at her own
place during business hours for professional advice or for lighter
amusement could she expect any other except professional recognition.
And after a few months of wistful loneliness she came, gradually, to
desire from these people nothing except what they gave.
But there were some people she met during that first year's practice
of her new profession who seemed to be unimpressed by the popular
belief in such an awesome actuality as New York "society." And some of
these, oddly enough, were the descendants of those who, perhaps, had
formed part of the only real society the big, raw, sprawling city
ever had. But that was long, long ago, in the day of the first
President.
New York will always be spotted with the symptoms but will never again
have it. Paris has gone the same way. London is still flushed with it,
Berlin hectic, Vienna fevered. But the days of a "society" as a
distinct ensemble, with a logical reason for being, with authority,
with functions, with offensive and defensive powers and fixed
boundaries, is over forever; possibly never existed, certainly never
will exist in the series of gregarious aggregations and segregations
known to a perplexed and slightly amused world as the city of New
York.
For Athalie that first year of new interests and of unfamiliar
successes passed more rapidly than had any single month ever before
passed in her life since the strenuous and ragged days of childhood.
It was a year of novelty, of excitement, of self-development, and the
development of interests as new as they had been unsuspected.
Like a gaily illuminated pageant the processional passed before her
with its constantly changing surroundings, new faces, new voices, new
ideas, new motives.
And the new faces were to be scanned and understood, the new voices
listened to intently, the new ideas analysed, the new motives detected
and dissected.
In drawing-rooms, in ballrooms, in boudoirs, new scenes constantly
presented themselves; one house was never like the next, one hostess
never resembled another; wealth itself was presented to her under
innumerable aspects ranging all the way from that false modesty and
smugness known as meekness, to fevered pretence, arrogance, and noisy
aggressiveness.