give herself that last touch of smartness, that slight atmosphere of the risque, that tres chic suggestion of impropriety, that made her the success of the season the winter of her arrival. Into a society composed of men and women of puritanical traditions, or, what is worse, the traditional respectability of the honest merchant princes of the red-plush and brown-stone era in New York, whose pose is that of careless immorality and whose conversation often reeks of the road-house, but beneath whose war-paint and feathers are concealed characters as stodgy as that of a Methodist Sunday-school teacher or as devoid of temperament as a Baptist missionary—into, in short, a society of “bogus badness” and affected worldliness, Mrs. Trevelyan blew like a cool breeze off the mountains of actuality upon the parched plain of imitation. Here, they felt, was the real thing, and their sordid souls thrilled with excitement at the thought. Women gained vicarious smartness from being seen with her. Little bores, whose greatest peccadillo was to drink two cocktails instead of one before dinner, swelled with worldly pride as they swarmed around her. She was a sensation, an education,
