morning," she added, clearing a
space in the centre of the confusion and rising to yield her seat to Miss
Bart.

Mrs. Trenor was a tall fair woman, whose height just saved her from
redundancy. Her rosy blondness had survived some forty years of futile
activity without showing much trace of ill-usage except in a diminished
play of feature. It was difficult to define her beyond saying that she
seemed to exist only as a hostess, not so much from any exaggerated
instinct of hospitality as because she could not sustain life except in a
crowd. The collective nature of her interests exempted her from the
ordinary rivalries of her sex, and she knew no more personal emotion than
that of hatred for the woman who presumed to give bigger dinners or have
more amusing house-parties than herself. As her social talents, backed by
Mr. Trenor's bank-account, almost always assured her ultimate triumph in
such competitions, success had developed in her an unscrupulous good
nature toward the rest of her sex, and in Miss Bart's utilitarian
classification of her friends, Mrs. Trenor ranked as the woman who was
least likely to "go back" on her.

"It was simply inhuman of Pragg to go off now," Mrs. Trenor declared, as
her friend seated herself at the desk. "She says her sister is going to
have a baby--as if that were anything to having a house-party! I'm sure I
shall get most horribly mixed up and there will be some awful rows. When
I was down at Tuxedo I asked a lot of people for next week, and I've
mislaid the list and can't remember who is coming. And this week is going
to be a horrid failure too--and Gwen Van Osburgh will go back and tell
her mother how bored people were. I did mean to ask the Wetheralls--that
was a blunder of Gus's. They disapprove of Carry Fisher, you know. As if
one could help having Carry Fisher! It WAS foolish of her to get that
second divorce--Carry always overdoes things--but she said the only way
to get a penny out of Fisher was to divorce him and make him pay alimony.
And poor Carry has to consider every dollar. It's really absurd of Alice
Wetherall to make such a fuss about meeting her, when one thinks of what
society is coming to. Some one said the other day that there was a
divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows. Besides,
Carry is the only person who can keep Gus in a good humour when we have
bores in the house. Have you noticed that ALL the husbands like her? All,
I mean, except her own.