THE GUESTS ARRIVING

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Mrs. Jack glanced happily through the crowded rooms. It was, she well knew, a notable assemblage of the best, the highest, and the fairest that the city had to offer. And others were arriving all the time. At this moment, in fact, Miss Lily Mandell arrived upon the arm of Mr. Lawrence Hirsch: the tall smoldering beauty swung undulant away along the hall to dispose of her wraps and schooled in power, close clipped hair groomed and faultless, the banker came into the room, wove greetings through the throng toward the focal centre of his rosy hostess, shook hands with her and kissed her lightly on one cheek saying with that cool irony of friendly humor that was a portion of the city style: “You haven’t looked so lovely, darling, since the days we used to dance the cancan together.”

The guests were now arriving in full force. Sometimes the elevator was so crowded with new arrivals that one group had hardly time to finish with greetings before the door would open and a new group would come in. Miss Roberta Heilprinn arrived with Mr. Robert Ahrens and made their greetings to their hostess: they were old friends of hers “in the theatre” and her greetings to them, while not more cordial or affectionate than to her other guests, were indefinably yet plainly more direct and casual: it was as if one of those masks—not of pretending, but of formal custom—which life imposes upon so many of the human relations, had been here sloughed off. It was here simply; “Oh, hello, Bertie—hello Bob:” the shade indefinable told everything: they were “show people”: they had “worked together.”

There were a good many “show people.” Roy Farley had now arrived accompanied by two young men from the Art Theatre where he was employed and by the Misses Hattie Warren and Bessie Lane, two grey-haired spinsters who were also directors of the theatre. Mr. Farley and his two young companions divested themselves of their light overcoats with graceful movements, gave them to the waiting maid and made their way into the crowded room to pay their duties to the hostess.

Old Jake Abramson came in with his sister, Irita; Stephen Hook, the novelist, arrived with his sister Mary. A moment later, Amy Van Leer, her beautiful head all sunning over with golden curls, arrived with a young Japanese, the sculptor, Nokamura, who had enjoyed a fashionable success the year before and had been for the nonce her lover, and with an immensely wealthy young Jew with a talent for music, who had written two of the songs of a current revue, and was her present one.

Many other people had filtered in, the place was crowded: there was Helen Reagan, a very beautiful woman with a Gibson face, touched by Irish freckles: she was the business manager of a repertory theatre, but it was rumored that her greatest talent lay in wangling large sums of money from infatuated millionaires for the support of her organization. One of these enamored Maecenases, a middle-aged plutocrat named Pendleton, was now with her. With proud and graceful carriage, and straight shoulders, slender, naked, hued like ivory, this beautiful woman moved along a miracle of cold seductiveness, in all the fragile cool intoxication of her beauty.

Saul Levenson came in with his wife, Virginia. He was one of the leaders of the modern theatre and one of its most eminent designers. He had been a friend of Mrs. Jack’s since childhood.

In addition to all these other more or less gifted, beautiful or distinguished people, most of whom had some connection with the arts, there were a number of the lesser fry—that is, people who had no great worldly renown, or any particular claim to distinction save that they were friends of Mrs. Jack.

There was her friend Agnes Wheeler and her husband. They were people who lived quietly in the country. Agnes Wheeler had been a girlhood friend of Mrs. Jack’s, had gone to school with her in childhood, had married a man who had died tragically and horribly after an agony of years of a cancer of the face which had finally eaten into his brain, and was now married again to a man who was dull and drab and unremarkable in every way. They had a small income and they lived modestly upon it.

There was also a lawyer named Roderick Hale and his wife. Hale wrote little verses which occasionally were published in newspaper columns and he had a wife who was interested in social service work. And there was also a young girl, a dancer at Irita Abramson’s Repertory Theatre, another girl who was the seamstress and the wardrobe woman there, and another girl of twenty, who was Mrs. Jack’s assistant in her own work.

It was a wholesome and admirable quality of her character that, as she had gone on in her profession and “up” in her career, as success, wealth, and renown had come to her and members of her family, she had not lost the sane and healthy practicality that was one of the essential elements of her life. She had not, as do so many people who achieve success or fame, lost her touch with life—with everyday life, the life about her, the life of the people with whom she worked, whom she worked for, who worked for her, or whom she had known in her youth.

As a result, she was always in touch with the common heart of life—not only with the lives and interests of the wealthy or celebrated people that she knew, but with the lives and interests of her maids, her cook, the man who drove her car, the stage-hands at the theatre, the seamstresses and helpers, the painters and carpenters who built her sets for her, the electricians who lighted them, as well as with all the actors, actresses, directors and producers whose names were current in the daily press.

It was a wonderful, a saving quality. A celebrity herself, she had escaped the banal and stereotyped existence that so many celebrities achieve—a life that is no life at all, made up no more of life, but of just a kind of barren parliament of famous names, a compendium of famous stories, a collection of jokes and anecdotes and stories about famous people, eagerly to be lapped up at secondhand and passed about among the popular—but really just a counterfeit of life, empty dead and stale as hell.

She had escaped this. The line of life ran like a golden thread through this woman’s years from first to last. She remembered every living thing that she had touched. And nearly everything that she had touched had lived. She had known sorrow in her youth, insecurity and hardship in her youth, heart break, disillusion and poor people in her youth. And she remembered all of them. She had not forgotten her old friends; she had a talent rare in modern life for loyal and abiding friendships and most of the people that were here tonight, even the most celebrated ones, were people that she had known for many years, and her friendship with some of them went back to childhood.

Another childhood friend of Mrs. Jack’s was present. This was Margaret Ettinger: she had married a bad painter, and tonight she had brought her husband. And her husband, who was not only a bad painter but a bad man, too, had brought his mistress, a young buxom, and fullblown whore, with him. This group provided the most bizarre and unpleasantly disturbing touch to an otherwise distinguished gathering.