tenburg lived in California, at Santa Barbara,
where her health was supposed to be better than elsewhere, and her
husband lived in Chicago. He visited his wife every winter to reinforce
her position, and his devoted mother, although her hatred for her
daughter-inlaw was scarcely approachable in words, went to Santa Barbara
every year to make things look better and to relieve her son.

When Frederick Ottenburg was beginning his junior year at Harvard, he
got a letter from Dick Brisbane, a Kansas City boy he knew, telling him
that his FIANCEE, Miss Edith Beers, was going to New York to buy her
trousseau. She would be at the Holland House, with her aunt and a girl
from Kansas City who was to be a bridesmaid, for two weeks or more. If
Ottenburg happened to be going down to New York, would he call upon Miss
Beers and "show her a good time"?

Fred did happen to be going to New York. He was going down from New
Haven, after the Thanksgiving game. He called on Miss Beers and found
her, as he that night telegraphed Brisbane, a "ripping beauty, no
mistake." He took her and her aunt and her uninteresting friend to the
theater and to the opera, and he asked them to lunch with him at the
Waldorf. He took no little pains in arranging the luncheon with the head
waiter. Miss Beers was the sort of girl with whom a young man liked to
seem experienced. She was dark and slender and fiery. She was witty and
slangy; said daring things and carried them off with NONCHALANCE. Her
childish extravagance and contempt for all the serious facts of life
could be charged to her father's generosity and his long packing-house
purse. Freaks that would have been vulgar and ostentatious in a more
simpleminded girl, in Miss Beers seemed whimsical and picturesque. She
darted about in magnificent furs and pumps and close-clinging gowns,
though that was the day of full skirts. Her hats were large and floppy.
When she wriggled out of her moleskin coat at luncheon, she looked like
a slim black weasel. Her satin dress was a mere sheath, so conspicuous
by its severity and scantness that every one in the dining-room stared.
She ate nothing but alligator-pear salad and hothouse grapes, drank a
little champagne, and took cognac in her coffee. She ridiculed, in the
raciest slang, the singers they had heard at the opera the night before,
and when her aunt pretended to reprove her, she murmured indifferently,
"What's the matter with you, old sport?" She rattled on with