Feeling ran high, I want to tell you, and a few of the younger set fell out of the ranks of good old Bohemia—­or was yanked out.  Luella Stultz’s father, who is old-fashioned, it was said, had give Luella a good licking for smoking cigarettes, and old Jesse Himebaugh had threatened his daughter Gussie with the reform school if she didn’t stop trying to get away from it all.  Even Beryl Mae’s aunt put her foot down.  Beryl Mae met me in the post office one day and says auntie won’t let her be a Bohemian any more, having threatened to take her new ukulele away from her if she goes to that Latin Quarter another single time; and poor Beryl Mae having hoped to do a Hawaiian dance in native costume for the intimate theatre, where it wouldn’t be misunderstood!

Things was just in this shape, with bitterness on every side and old friends not speaking, and the opposition passing the Bohemians on the street with the frown of moral disgust, and no one knowing how it would all end, when I hear that Cora Wales has a niece coming from New York to visit her—­a Miss Smith.  I says to myself, “My lands!  Here’s another Miss Smith from New York when it looks to me like the one we got is giving us a plenty of the big league stuff.”  But I meet Cora Wales and learn that this one’s first name is Dulcie, which again seemed to make a difference.

Cora says this Dulcie niece is one of New York’s society leaders and she’s sorry she invited her, because what kind of a town is it in which to introduce a pure young girl that never smoked or drank in her life and whose people belong to one of the very most exclusive churches in the city.  She had hoped to give Dulcie a good time, but how can she sully herself with any of our young people that have took up Bohemianism?  She being fresh from her social triumphs in New York, where her folks live in one of the very most fashionable apartment houses on Columbus Avenue, right in the centre of things and next to the elevated railway, will be horrified at coming to a town where society seems to be mostly a little group of people who do things they hadn’t ought to.

Dulcie is a dear girl and very refined, everything she wears being hand embroidered, and it would of been a good chance for Red Gap to get acquainted with a young society girl of the right sort, but with this scandal tearing up the town it looks like the visit will be a failure for all parties.

I tell Cora on the contrary it looks like a good chance to recall the town to its better self.  If this here Dulcie is all that is claimed for her she can very probably demolish the Latin Quarter and have us all leading correct society lives in no time, because the public is fickle and ever ready for new stuff, and as a matter of fact I suspect the Latin Quarter is in a bad way because of everything in town of an illegal character having been drunk up by the comrades.  Me?  I was trying to get some new life into the fight, understand, being afraid it would die natural and leave us to a dull winter.