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

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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.




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