WHITEWASH
meetings. If you have anything in the way of a 'poem,' wear it. The Despard always wears a 'poem.' The last was a sonnet in solferino."
"I have a ballad in blue, I think, but it's in the bottom of my trunk," Victoria suggested. "I might wear a very short golf skirt, and go as a quatrain; I have been told my feet were correct."
"I," said Mrs. Durham, "will disport my usual 'lines' in a lavender with lace refrain. Mr. Theodore Trent Gore told me last time it reminded him of Beethoven's second symphony."
"Who's the gentleman?"
"What! you don t know the American Mallarmé? the Maeterlinckean symbolist of the New World?"
"Alas! no!"
"Nor Stephen McKenzie, who publishes The Voice, nor Miss Red, who does terpsichorean-turns-for-the-first-families-only? Oh, my dear, my dear! put on the ballad in blue, and come at once! You can't be too early or stay too late in your pitiable state of ignorance!"
Victoria obediently disappeared into the depths
