Lady Betty Across the Water

								

and Chicago people--that is, the people who count in Society with a big
S: and it was a great triumph for my cousin to become the
Three-Hundred-and-Ninety-Ninth in the Four Hundred. She did it by
buying a Russian Prince."
"Buying a----"
"Yes, love, he was going to the highest bidder, and she bought him.
That is, she entertained him so gorgeously and did so many nice things
for him, that he posed as her property; and as everyone was dying to
meet him, it made her. She'd been working killingly hard before that,
for a whole year after taking her house on Fifth Avenue and building
her cottage at Newport, but it was buying the Prince which did the
trick. On the strength of that episode and its consequences, she went
to Europe with very nice introductions, and as you know, deah, she has
made some valuable as well as pleasant friends. To live up to them and
her reputation, she will have to be busy for a while dropping a lot of
old acquaintances."
"How horrid!" I couldn't help exclaiming, though Mrs. Ess Kay was going
to be my hostess.
"Yes, it seems rather miserable to me, because I'm a weak, lazy,
Southern thing, who would be right down sick, if I had to hurt any
human being's feelings. Yet perhaps it looks fair to her. She's so
ambitious, and she's worked so hard, she has deserved to succeed. As
for poor me, she just regularly mesmerises me all through. She
mesmerised me into coming up from Kentucky and visiting her this
spring; then she mesmerised me into going with her to Europe. But I'm
not sorry I went, for I've had a right good time."
"I'm so glad you went," said I, "because if you hadn't I shouldn't have
met you. I'm sure I should love Kentucky if all the people there are
like you. But these things you've been saying seem so odd. Do you mean
to tell me that the people who lead Society in New York want to keep
their set limited to a certain number, and refuse to know others, even
if they're extraordinarily clever and interesting?
"They don't like them to be too clever, because they call such people
'queer'--that is, unless they happen to be 'lions' of some sort from
England or other places abroad. Then, so long as they're not
American, they welcome them with open arms."
"I'm glad Society isn't like that in England," I said. "There the
real people--the people who have the right to make social laws, you
know--are delighted with anyone who can amuse them. Of course, deep
down in our hearts, we may be proud if we have old names, which have
been famous for hundreds of years in one way or another; but we are so
used, after all those centuries, to being sure of ourselves, that we
just take our position for granted, and don't think much more about it.
If people who haven't got quite the same position are gentlefolk, and
amusing, or clever, or beautiful, or anything like that which really
matters, why, we're only too pleased with them."