cotton lace
cape all over town!"

People poured in. The rooms began to swarm. There was a warm odor of kid
gloves, scent-bags, and heliotrope. There was an incessant fluttering of
fans and bobbing of heads. One hundred gentlemen said, "How warm it is!"
One hundred ladies of the highest fashion answered, "Very." Fifty young
men, who all wore coats, collars, and waistcoats that seemed to have been
made in the lump, and all after the same pattern, stood speechless about
the rooms, wondering what under heaven to do with their hands. Fifty
older married men, who had solved that problem, folded their hands behind
their backs, and beamed vaguely about, nodding their heads whenever they
recognized any other head, and saying, "Good-evening," and then, after a
little more beaming, "How are yer?" Waiters pushed about with trays
covered with little glasses of lemonade and port-sangaree, which offered
favorable openings to the unemployed young men and the married gentlemen,
who crowded along with a glass in each hand, frightening all the ladies
and begging every body's pardon.

All the Knickerbocker jewels glittered about the rooms. Mrs. Bleecker Van
Kraut carried not less than thirty thousand dollars' worth of diamonds
upon her person--at least that was Mrs. Orry's deliberate conclusion
after a careful estimate. Mrs. Dagon, when she heard what Mrs. Orry
said, merely exclaimed, "Fiddle! Anastatia Orry can tell the price of
lutestring a yard because Winslow Orry failed in that business, but she
knows as much of diamonds as an elephant of good manners."

The Van Kraut property had been bowing about the drawing-rooms of New
York for a year or two, watched with palpitating hearts and longing eyes.
Until that was disposed of, nothing else could win a glance. There were
several single hundreds of thousands openly walking about the same rooms,
but while they were received very politely, they were made to feel that
two millions were in presence and unappropriated, and they fell humbly
back.

Fanny Newt, upon her debut in society, had contemplated the capture of
the Van Kraut property; but the very vigor with which she conducted the
campaign had frightened the poor gentleman who was the present member for
that property, in society, so that he shivered and withdrew on the dizzy
verge of a declaration; and when he subsequently encountered Lucy Slumb,
she was immediately invested with the family jewels.

"Heaven save me from a smart woman!