Cora’s eyes lighted up with a great hope and she beat it off to the Recorder office to have a piece put in the paper about Dulcie’s coming.  It was a grand piece, what with Cora giving the points and Edgar Tomlinson writing it.  It said one of Gotham’s fair daughters would winter in our midst, and how she was a prominent society leader and an ornament of the fast hunting set, noted for her wit and beauty and dazzling costumes, and how a series of brilliant affairs was being planned in her honour by her hostess and aunt, Mrs. Leonard Wales, Red Gap’s prominent society matron and representative of all that was best in our community, who would entertain extensively at her new and attractive home in Price’s Addition.  And so forth.

I’m bound to say it created a flurry of interest among the younger dancing set, and more than one begun to consider whether they would remain loyal to Bohemia or plunge back into society once more, where stockings are commonly wore, and smoking if done at all is hurriedly sneaked through out on the porch or up in the bathroom.

From Cora’s description I was all prepared to find Dulcie a tall, stately creature of twenty-eight, kind of blase and haggard from her wearing social duties in New York.  But not so.  Not so at all.  Cora had invitations out for a tea the day after Dulcie come; invitations, that is, to the non-Bohemians and such as had reformed or give good signs of it.  I don’t know which head I got in under.  And this Dulcie niece was nothing but a short, fat, blond kid of seventeen or eighteen that had never led any society whatever.  You could tell that right quick.

She was rapidly eating cream-cheese sandwiches when I was presented to her.  I knew in one look that society had never bothered Dulcie any.  Victuals was her curse.  In the cattle business it ain’t riding disrespectful horses that gets you the big money; it’s being able to guess weights.  And if Dulcie pulled a pound less than one hundred and eighty then all my years of training has gone for naught.  She was certainly big-framed stock and going into the winter strong.  Between bites of sandwich, with a marshmallow now and then, she was saying that she was simply crazy about the war, having the dandiest young French soldier for a godson and sending him packages of food and cigarettes constantly, and all the girls of her set had one, and wasn’t it the darlingest idea.

And her soldier was only twenty-two, though his beard made him look more mature, and he wrote such dandy letters, but she didn’t suppose there would ever be anything between them because papa was too busy with his coal yard to take her over there.