temporary
financial cloud, wept literal tears because he could not afford to buy
her back to them. It was, of course, the "Bonnybraeside" interview
that did it. So cleverly was this column-and-a-half of chatty
sharp-shooting manoeuvred that Mrs. Julia Carter Sykes sent hundreds of
copies to her friends, while her fellow celebrities giggled among
themselves, and the publishers wondered exactly what the Public really
wanted, anyhow. You couldn't tell, any more, they complained.

Just here began the little cloud on Mrs. Dickett's happiness. For two
years the family were very proud of Molly, and Eleanor gave a tea for
her on one of her infrequent visits to them and got some people she
could never have hoped for otherwise on the strength of her sister's
celebrityship, for her Sunday morning column-and-a-half got to
two-thirds of the town's breakfast tables, and her picture was at the
head of it, now. At twenty-five she was called (and probably
correctly) the second highest paid woman journalist in the country, and
she spoke familiarly of names that are head-lines to most of us and
bought evening gowns at "little shops" on Fifth Avenue. She lived with
a red-haired friend, a clever illustrator of rising vogue, in a pretty
little apartment, and Mrs. Dickett dined there one night with a really
great novelist, a tenor from the Metropolitan Opera House and a young
Englishman whose brother was a baronet. They had four glasses at their
plates and the maid's cap and apron were tremendously interesting to
Mrs. Dickett. But when she learned the rental of the apartment, the
wages of the maid, the cost of Molly's black evening-frock and the
average monthly bill for Molly's hansoms, she no longer wondered that
her daughter was always poor. She had never spent seventy-five dollars
for a single garment in her life, barring a fur-lined cloak, a
Christmas gift from her husband, and to drink creme-de-menthe at a roof
garden gave her a very odd sensation. However, there was the baronet's
brother...

But at one of the songs at the roof-garden Mrs. Dickett drew the line,
and the entire British Peerage, embattled, could not have persuaded her
that it could possibly be the duty--not to suggest the pleasure--of any
respectable woman to listen to it. As she put it later to the
red-haired girl and Molly, no unmarried woman could understand it and
no married woman would want to, a simple statement which they persisted
in treating as an ep