Personally anything but attractive, he seems able to organize and control others in a most singular way.  Perhaps it is because he has a genius for taking pains and planning successful entertainments for his friends, even to the minutest detail, and giving them the subtle distinction of both originality and finish, without troubling their givers to think for themselves.  Miss Lavinia-says that he has the entree of the two or three very exclusive New York houses that have never yet opened their doors to Mrs. Latham and several more aspiring Whirlpoolers, Mrs. Jenks-Smith having penetrated the sacred precincts, only by right of having been presented at the English Court in the last reign through the influence of her stepdaughter, who married a poverty-stricken title.

“I don’t know what it all amounts to,” said the outspoken Lady of the Bluffs on her return, “except that I’m in it now with both feet, which is little enough pay for the trouble I took and the money Jenks-Smith put out.

“Our son-in-law?  No, he’s not exactly English, he’s Irish, blood of the old kings, they say; but all the good it does him is, that he can wear his hat with a feather in it, or else his shoes, I can never remember which, in the presence of royalty, when if it wasn’t for good American money he’d have neither one or the other.

“Money?  Oh yes, that’s all they want of us over there; we’ve no cause to stick up our noses and think it’s ourselves.  We know, Jenks-Smith and I, for haven’t we been financial mother and father in law to a pair of them for ten years?  Jenks-Smith was smart, though; he wouldn’t give a lump sum down, but makes them an allowance, and we go over every year or so and bail them out of some sort of a mess to boot, have the plumbing fixed up, and start the children all over with new clothes.  That’s what we’re doing when the papers say, ’Mr. and Mrs. Jenks-Smith, who went to Carlsbad for the waters, are now in Ireland, being entertained in regal style by their daughter and son-in-law at Bally-whack House.’”

Miss Lavinia says with a shiver that whoever marries Monty Bell, and it is absolutely necessary for him to make a wealthy connection in the immediate future, will have all New York doors open to her, and that, as Mrs. Latham is leaving no stone unturned in order to become a social leader, a marriage between Sylvia and Mr. Bell would secure her the complete prestige necessary to her ambition, while rearranged families are so common and often the results of such trivial causes, that the fact of the man’s having a lovely wife and two children living abroad does not militate against him in the least.  It all seems ghastly, this living life as if it was a race track, where to reach the social goal is the only thought, no matter how, or over or through what wreckage, or in what company the race is to be won.