stories which provided the opening barrage of conversation at dinner.
"There is one woman who they say gives enormous parties," Janey told her at dinner, "who was once the cook for a cousin of Mrs. Mallinson."
They assured her, although she knew it well enough, that Newport was not the same. It had lost its tone; and in losing it (thought Sabine) it had left Mrs. Champion and the Virgins far behind. Bishop Smallwood, the Apostle to the Genteel, who came sometimes to spend a week with his "wa'am friend" Mrs. Champion, shared their disgust on Sabine's right and expressed properly outraged sentiments.
If America were anything, Sabine thought, over her guinea fowl, it was change . . . change . . . change. And God help those who didn't keep up with it! All the conversation gave her a curious sense of having passed poor Janey and Margaret and the Apostle and left them far behind. They seemed very far away. She felt that she was being kind to them in having come to dine at The Cedars. And once Mrs. Champion's word had been law in that tight little world which was now exploded, leaving them stranded, remote and helpless and pitiful, pretending all the while that it was their world, after all, which really counted.
She knew that they would find a bitter triumph in the news that had come with the morning Times, for they could not have forgotten how she stole Richard Callendar (by the lucky turn of events which they would never know) from under the noses of all of them. There had been so little excitement in their lives; certainly they had not forgotten, certainly they would not miss an opportunity for which they had waited so long. Yet they seemed so remote and negligible to her that she did not even wince when at last Mrs. Champion sidled up to the subject.
She was able to tell them and Bishop Smallwood, who in the decline of the season was fairly panting for gossip, that Lilli Barr was the same girl who had played at that scandalous party of Thérèse Callendar's. (Did they remember the naked Javanese
