“Have you remembered to take your medicine?”

* * * * *

“How perfectly horrid of you!  Take it at once!  It’s the one in the brown bottle—­six drops in a wineglass of water—­”

CHAPTER XII

Mrs. Hind-Willet, born to the purple—­or rather entitled to a narrow border of discreet mauve on all occasions of ceremony in Manhattan, was a dreamer of dreams.  One of her dreams concerned her hyphenated husband, and she put him away; another concerned Penrhyn Cardemon; and she woke up.  But the persistent visualisation, which had become obsession, of a society to be formed out of the massed intellects of Manhattan regardless of race, morals, or previous condition of social servitude—­a gentle intellectual affinity which knew no law of art except individual inspiration, haunted her always.  And there was always her own set to which she could retreat if desirable.

She had begun with a fashionable and semi-fashionable nucleus which included Mrs. Atherstane, the Countess d’Enver, Latimer Varyck, Olaf Dennison, and Pedro Carrillo, and then enlarged the circle from those perpetual candidates squatting anxiously upon the social step-ladder all the way from the bottom to the top.

The result was what Ogilvy called intellectual local option; and though he haunted this agglomeration at times, particularly when temporarily smitten by a pretty face or figure, he was under no illusions concerning it or the people composing it.

Returning one afternoon from a reception at Mrs. Atherstane’s he replied to Annan’s disrespectful inquiries and injurious observations: 

“You’re on to that joint, Henry; it’s a saloon, not a salon; and Art is the petrified sandwich.  Fix me a very, ve-ry high one, dearie, because little sunshine is in love again.”

“Who drew the lucky number?” asked Annan with a shrug.

“The Countess d’Enver.  She’s the birdie.”

“Intellectually?”

“Oh, she’s an intellectual four-flusher, bless her heart!  But she was the only woman there who didn’t try to mentally frisk me.  We lunch together soon, Henry.”

“Where’s Count hubby?”

“Aloft.  She’s a bird,” he repeated, fondly reminiscent over his high-ball—­“and I myself am the real ornithological thing—­the species that Brooklyn itself would label ‘boid’ ...  She has such pretty, confiding ways, Harry.”

“You’d both better join the Audubon Society for Mutual Protection,” observed Annan dryly.

“I’ll stand for anything she stands for except that social Tenderloin; I’ll join anything she joins except the ‘classes now forming’ in that intellectual dance hall.  By the way, who do you suppose was there?”

“The police?”

“Naw—­the saloon wasn’t raided, though ‘Professor’ Carrillo’s poem was assez raide.  Mek-mek-k-k-k!  But oh, the ginky pictures!  Oh, the Art Beautiful!  Aniline rainbows exploding in a physical culture school couldn’t beat that omelette!...  And guess who was pouring tea in the centre of the olio, Harry!”