Husbands, she had ascertained, were going to be fashionable in London this year, or, if not exactly fashionable, were going to be “worn” in the manner of some invisible but judicious part of the dress, like a cholera belt, or, as Amelie would have called it when she spoke American, a gripe-girdle. Pearls also were worn, though not so invisibly as husbands, and Amelie had five superb ropes of these, which could be verified by anybody, and never got on her nerves at all. She had also, among her general equipment, a very excellent sort of social godmother, Lady Brackenbury, who, for a remuneration that made no difference to Amelie, but a good deal to her, was prepared to exert herself to the utmost pitch of her very valuable capabilities in the matter of bringing people to see her and in taking her to see people, and in preventing the wrong sort of people from having any sort of access to her. Amelie was willing to put herself into Lady Brackenbury’s hands with the complete confidence in which she would have entrusted her mouth to a reliable dentist, had her admirable teeth demanded any sort of adjustment. She could not have made a wiser choice: there was nobody, in fact, among possible godmothers in London, who would have been a sounder sponsor.
The two had met eighteen months before in New York, and subsequently, in the summer, Violet Brackenbury had spent a month with her friend at her cottage at Newport, which exteriorly resembled an immense Swiss chalet, and inside was like a terminus hotel. There, on ground for ever afterwards more historic than Marathon, had been fought the famous sixteen days’ war, in which Amelie had so signally defeated and deposed the reigning queen of the very smartest set of New York society.
The point to be decided, of course, was which of the two could give the most ludicrous, extravagant, and delirious parties, and thus be acclaimed sovereign among hostesses. Amelie, as challenger, had flung the gauntlet in the shape of a midnight lawn-tennis party, with hundreds of arc lamps hung above the courts, the nets covered with spangles, and the lines made of ground glass faintly illuminated by electric lights beneath, while, by way of contrast with this brilliance, a number of men dressed like mourners at a funeral, with top-hats and black scarves, picked up and presented the lawn-tennis balls to her guests in coffin-shaped trays. Here was a high bid for supremacy, and it was felt that Mrs. Cicero B. Dace would have to do something great in order to eclipse the brightness and originality of this entertainment. But bright and original she was, and when, two nights later, she gave her marvellous canary ball, it was thought that her throne had not yet tottered. On this occasion her admiring guests were thrilled to find that all round the walls of her ballroom had been planted mimosa trees, among the branches of which three thousand canaries had been let loose, a’fter being doped with hard-boiled egg soaked in rum and water. These chirped and sang in a feverish and intoxicated manner. At the end of the ball the men of the party, dressed as huntsmen and armed with air-guns, shot these unfortunate songsters and presented the spoils to their partners in the cotillion.
Amelie had two answers to that—the first an indignant letter, printed in large type throughout the American press, denouncing this massacre, and the second another ball. The letter Mrs. Cicero B. Dace did not object to at all, since it but enhanced her notoriety, but she objected to the ball very much indeed, since Amelie’s ingenious mind hit on the simple and exquisite plan of dispensing with the band, and having in its place a choir of three hundred singers, who, in batches of one hundred at a time, sang the dance tunes. The effect was contagious, and dancers joined in also, producing, as the press said, the “most stupendously lyrical effect since the days of Sappho.” Then Mrs. Cicero B. Dace sat down and thought again, lighting upon the famous idea of the auction ball, in which a real English Duke acted as auctioneer, and before each dance put up the ladies for auction, to be bid for by the men who wished to be their partners. But Amelie swiftly sent for Arthur Bolney Ross, and he and a friend of hers, who was backing her in this struggle for sovereignty, continued to bid for her for so long that, out of sinister compassion for her hostess, she stepped down from the rostrum and refused to dance with either, for fear that there should be no more dancing for anybody. This completely spoiled the success of the auction ball, and while Mrs. Cicero B. Dace was still staggering from its failure, Amelie annihilated her altogether by giving her inimitable glacier ball on the hottest night of the year. A refrigerating apparatus was rigged up on the walls of her ballroom, and their entire surface thickly coated with real ice. Glass channels, fringed with blue gentians, were made round the margin of the floor, to carry off the melting water, while accomplished members of the band yodelled at intervals to carry out the Swiss illusion. She and the auctioneer Duke—whom she had captured from under the nose of Mrs. Cicero B. Dace—dressed in knickerbockers, with a rope round his shoulder and an ice-axe in his hand, led the cotillion, and Mrs. Cicero B. Dace, having in vain tried to point out that the gentians were three parts artificial flowers, retired at 1 A.M. in floods of tears.
Such were Amelie Ross’s social achievements when, unlike Alexander the Great, she bethought herself that there were more worlds to conquer, and decided to extend her dominions over England. Her godmother, of course, knew her history, having, indeed, assisted at the history she had already made, and on the night of her arrival at the Ritz Hotel, dined with her there in her charming room looking over the Green Park, before going with her to her box at the opera. As regards this first appearance of her god-daughter, Violet Brackenbury had laid her plans very carefully, and explained them as they dined.
“I have asked nobody else at all, dear Amelie,” she said, “because I want everybody to be wild to find out who you are, and nobody will be able to say. Curiosity is the best sauce of all.”
Amelie became thoroughly American for a moment.
“My!” she said. “Don’t you mean that your folk over here haven’t seen hundreds and hundreds of pictures of me in the papers?”
“Probably not one, my dear. And I’ve only told one woman that you are coming. You are going to burst on everybody tonight, you and your lovely face, and your six feet of height, and your wonderful hair, and your wonderful pearls, and the most wonderful gown that you’ve got. I want all London for an hour or two to be wild to know who you are, and I have told the box-attendant to take your name off the door, and not to let anybody in between the acts. Afterwards I shall take you to the dance at Alice Middlesex’s, which, luckily, ever so luckily, is tonight. She is the one person I have told.”
“The Duchess of Middlesex?” asked Amelie.
“Yes; and she is quite certain to ask you if you know Lady Creighton, that dreadful countrywoman of yours who is climbing into London like a monkey and hopping about it like a flea. She tried to patronize Alice, and Alice won’t get over it either in this world or the next. So tell her that Lady Creighton is not received in New York—which I believe is the case, isn’t it?—and look very much surprised at the idea of knowing her. I can’t tell you how important that is.”
Amelie frowned slightly.
“But Elsie Creighton telephoned to me half an hour ago,” she said, “asking me to lunch with her tomorrow to meet—”
“It doesn’t matter whom she asked you to meet. If she asked you to meet the entire Royal Family, you would be wise to refuse. You don’t want U> climb into London on the top of a hurdy-gurdy.”
“My! What’s a hurdy-gurdy?” asked Amelie, whose English lessons had not taught her that word.
“Hurdy-gurdy? Street organ. It doesn’t matter. You don’t want to know people, if you understand; you want to make people want to know you. My plan is not that you should climb up, but that you should spread down.”
Amelie instantly caught this.
“I see,” she said. “I’m to begin at the top. But Elsie Creighton said there was a Prince coming to lunch tomorrow. I thought that was a good beginning.”
“Not so good as the Creighton woman is bad. Did you accept, by the way?”
“Why, yes.”
“Then telephone tomorrow exactly at lunch-time to say you are ill, and lunch with me very obviously downstairs in the restaurant. In fact, it couldn’t have happened better. It will mark you off very definitely from her and her crowd. I don’t mean to say that there are not charming people among it, but it would never