“I have on my very oldest gown,” she explained with violet-eyed animation, patting her freshly dressed hair with two smooth little hands loaded with diamonds and turquoises.  “I’m afraid somebody will start something and then they’ll throw confetti, and somebody will think it’s funny to aim champagne corks at you.  So I’ve come prepared,” she added, looking up at him with a challenge to deny her beauty.  “By the way,” she said, “I’m Mazie Gray.  Nobody had the civility to tell you, did they?”

“They said something....  I’m Louis Neville,” he replied, smiling.

“Are you?” she laughed.  “Well, you may take it from mother that you’re as cute as your name, Louis.  Who was it they had all framed up to give me my cues?  That big Burleson gentleman who’d starve if he had to laugh for a living, wasn’t it?  Can you laugh, child?”

“A few, Mazie.  It is my only Sunday accomplishment.”

“Dearie,” she added, correcting him.

“It is my only accomplishment, dearie.”

“That will be about all—­for a beginning!” She laughed as the cab stopped at the red awning and Neville aided her to descend.

Steps, vestibules, stairs, cloak-rooms were crowded with jolly, clamouring throngs flourishing horns, canes, rattles, and dusters decked with brilliant ribbons.  Already some bore marks of premature encounters with confetti and cocktails.

Waiters and head-waiters went gliding and scurrying about, assigning guests to tables reserved months in advance.  Pages in flame-coloured and gold uniforms lifted the silken rope that stretched its barrier between the impatient crowd and the tables; managers verified offered credentials and escorted laughing parties to spaces bespoken.

Two orchestras, relieving each other, fiddled and tooted continuously; great mounds of flowers, smilax, ropes of evergreens, multi-tinted electroliers made the vast salon gay and filled it with perfume.

Even in the beginning it was lively enough though not yet boisterous in the city where all New York was dining and preparing for eventualities; the eventualities being that noisy mid-winter madness which seizes the metropolis when the birth of the New Year is imminent.

It is a strange evolution, a strange condition, a state of mind not to be logically accounted for.  It is not accurate to say that the nicer people, the better sort, hold aloof; because some of them do not.  And in this uproarious carnival the better sort are as likely to misbehave as are the worse; and they have done it, and do it, and probably will continue to say and do and tolerate and permit inanities in themselves and in others that, at other moments, they would regard as insanities—­and rightly.

Around every table, rosily illuminated, laughter rang.  White throats and shoulders glimmered, jewels sparkled, the clear crystalline shock of glasses touching glasses rang continual accompaniment to the music and the breezy confusion of voices.