“They’re trying to get the Princess Madeleine into Society,” said George Graves.
“Hell fire!” Eugene cried, grinning. “Let’s let her in, if that’s all she wants. We belong to the Younger Set, don’t we?”
“You may,” said George Graves, reeling with laughter, “but I don’t. I wouldn’t be caught dead with the little pimps.”
“Mr. Eugene Gant was the host last night at a hot wienie roast given to members of the local Younger Set at Dixieland, the beautiful old ancestral mansion of his mother, Mrs. Eliza Gant.”
George Graves staggered. “You oughtn’t to say that,’Gene,” he gasped. He shook his head reproachfully. “Your mother’s a fine woman.”
“During the course of the evening, the Honorable George Graves, the talented scion of one of our oldest and wealthiest families, the Chesterfield Graveses, ($10 a week and up), rendered a few appropriate selections on the jews-harp.”
Pausing deliberately, George Graves wiped his streaming eyes, and blew his nose. In the windows of Bain’s millinery store, a waxen nymph bore a confection of rakish plumes upon her false tresses, and extended her simpering fingers in elegant counterpoise. Hats For Milady. O that those lips had language.
At this moment, with a smooth friction of trotting rumps, the death-wagon of Rogers-Malone turned swiftly in from the avenue, and wheeled by on ringing hoofs. They turned curiously and watched it draw up to the curb.
“Another Redskin bit the dust,” said George Graves.
Come, delicate death, serenely arriving, arriving.
“Horse” Hines came out quickly on long flapping legs, and opened the doors behind. In another moment, with the help of the two men on the driver’s seat, he had lowered the long wicker basket gently, and vanished, quietly, gravely, into the fragrant gloom of his establishment.
As Eugene watched, the old fatality of place returned. Each day, he thought, we pass the spot where some day we must die; or shall I, too, ride dead to some mean building yet unknown? Shall this bright clay, the hill-bound, die in lodgings yet unbuilt? Shall these eyes, drenched with visions yet unseen, stored with the viscous and interminable seas at dawn, with the sad comfort
