The Metropolis

"You'll find your place," said Mrs. Alden — "the people you like and who like you." And she went on to explain that here he was being passed about among a number of very different 'sets," with different people and different tastes. Society had become split up in that manner of late — each set being jealous and contemptuous of all the other sets. Because of the fact that they overlapped a little at the edges, it was possible for him to meet here a great many people who never met each other, and were even unaware of each other's existence.

And Mrs. Alden went on to set forth the difference between these "sets"; they ran from the most exclusive down to the most "yellow," where they shaded off into the disreputable rich — of whom, it seemed, there were hordes in the

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city. These included "sporting" and theatrical and political people, some of whom were very rich indeed; and these sets in turn shaded off into the criminals and the demi-monde — who might also easily be rich, "Some day," said Mrs. Alden, "you should get my brother to tell you about all these people. He's been in politics, you know, and ne has a racing-stable."

And Mrs. Alden told him about the subtle little differences in the conventions of these various sets of Society. There was the matter of women smoking, for instance. All women smoked, nowadays; but some would do it only in their own apartments, with their women friends; and some would retire to an out-of-the-way corner to do it; while others would smoke in their own dining rooms, or wherever the men smoked. All agreed, however, in never smoking "in public" — that is, where they would be seen by people not of their own set. Such, at any rate, had always been the rule, though a few daring ones were beginning to defy even that.

Such rules were very rigid, but they were purely conventional, they had nothing to do with right or wrong: a fact which Mrs. Alden set forth with her usual incisiveness. A woman, married or unmarried, might travel with a man all over Europe, and everyone might know that she did it, but it would make no difference, so long as she did not do it in America. There was one young matron whom Montague would meet, a raging beauty, who regularly got drunk at dinner parties, and had to be escorted to her carriage by the butler. She moved in the most

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exclusive circles, and everyone treated it as a joke. Unpleasant things like this did not hurt a person unless they got "out"—that is, unless they became a scandal in the courts or the newspapers. Mrs. Alden herself had a friend (whom she cordially hated) who had gotten a divorce from her husband and married her lover forthwith, and had for this been ostracised by Society. Once when she came to some semi-public affair, fifty women had risen at once and left the room! She might have lived with her lover, both before and after the divorce, and everyone might have known it, and no one would have cared; but the convenances declared that she should not marry him until a year had elapsed after the divorce.

One thing to which Mrs. Alden could testify, as a result of a lifetime's observation, was the rapid rate at which these conventions, even the most essential of them, were giving way, and being replaced by a general "do as you please." Anyone could see that the power of women like Mrs. Devon, who represented the old regime, and were dignified and austere and exclusive, was yielding before the onslaught of new people, who were bizarre and fantastic and promiscuous and loud. And the younger sets cared no more about anyone — nor about anything under heaven, save to have a good time in their own harum-scarum ways. In the old days one always received a neatly written or engraved invitation to dinner, worded in impersonal and formal style; but the other day Mrs. Alden had found a message which had been taken from the

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telephone: "Please come to dinner, but don't come unless you can bring a man, or we'll be thirteen at the table."