thousand dollars apiece, and there were bull-dogs worth twice that.
There was a woman who had come all the way from the Pacific coast to
have a specialist perform an operation upon the throat of her Yorkshire
terrier! There was another who had built for her dog a tiny Queen Anne
cottage, with rooms papered and carpeted and hung with lace curtains!
Once a young man of fashion had come to the Waldorf and registered
himself and "Miss Elsie Cochrane"; and when the clerk made the usual
inquiries as to the relationship of the young lady, it transpired that
Miss Elsie was a dog, arrayed in a prim little tea-gown, and requiring
a room to herself. And then there was a tale of a cat which had
inherited a life-pension from a forty-thousand-dollar estate; it had a
two-floor apartment and several attendants, and sat at table and ate
shrimps and Italian chestnuts, and had a velvet couch for naps, and a
fur-lined basket for sleeping at night!

Four days of horses were enough for Montague, and on Friday morning,
when Siegfried Harvey called him up and asked if he and Alice would
come out to "The Roost" for the week-end, he accepted gladly. Charlie
Carter was going, and volunteered to take them in his car; and so again
they crossed the Williamsburg Bridge--"the Jewish passover," as Charlie
called it--and went out on Long Island.

Montague was very anxious to get a "line" on Charlie Carter; for he had
not been prepared for the startling promptness with which this young
man had fallen at Alice's feet. It was so obvious, that everybody was
smiling over it--he was with her every minute that he could arrange it,
and he turned up at every place to which she was invited. Both Mrs.
Winnie and Oliver were quite evidently complacent, but Montague was by
no means the same. Charlie had struck him as a good-natured but rather
weak youth, inclined to melancholy; he was never without a cigarette in
his fingers, and there had been signs that he was not quite proof
against the pitfalls which Society set about him in the shape of
decanters and wine-cups: though in a world where the fragrance of
spirits was never out of one's nostrils, and where people drank with
such perplexing frequency, it was hard to know where to draw a line.

"You won't find my place like Havens's," Siegfried Harvey had said. "It
is real country." Montague found it the most attractive of all the
homes he had seen so far. It was a big rambling house, all in rustic
style, with gre