No one spoke, for no one could guess what you did to outdoor properly.  About all they could think of was hustling out after another chunk for the fireplace or bringing a scuttle of coal up from the cellar.  But they soon got the idea.  Dulcie said right from this window she could see a corking hill for a toboggan slide, and it would be perfectly darling to be out there with plenty of hot coffee and sandwiches; and there must be some peachy trips for snowshoe parties with sandwiches and coffee at the end; or skating in the moonlight with a big bonfire and coffee and sandwiches.

She suggested other things with coffee and sandwiches and finally got up some real enthusiasm when she said she had brought some of the dearest sport toggery with her.  The girls was excited enough when they found out you had to dress especial for it.  They was willing to listen to anything like that if New York society was really mad about it, even if it conflicted with lifelong habits—­no one in Red Gap but small boys having ever slid downhill.

And still I didn’t suspect Dulcie was going to groundsluice Vernabelle.  It looked like the Latin Quarter would still have the best of it, at least during a cold winter.  Which goes to show that you can’t tell what society will go mad about, even in Red Gap, when you can dress for it.

The girls had got a line on Dulcie and was properly impressed by her, and then with an evening affair at the Wales home the dancing men had their chance.  Even some of the Bohemians was let to come, just to have ’em see that there was indeed a better life; and reports of Dulcie was such that all took advantage of it.  The male sex was strong for the girl at once.  She didn’t know that life is anything but selective, or that all the arts round out one’s appreciation of the beautiful, or that anything was “by way of being” something.  But all the food she took didn’t make her torpid; she giggled easily and had eyes like hothouse grapes, and in spite of her fat there was something about her, like Cousin Egbert said of Vernabelle.  Anyway, she prevailed.  Oswald Cummings, the pagan, for one, quickly side-stepped his destiny of splendid sins, and Hugo Jennings told Dulcie he had merely gone to this Latin Quarter as he would go to an animal show, never having meant for one moment to take Bohemians up, any more than New York society would.

First thing I hear, the winter-sports club has been organized, snowshoes sent for and a couple of toboggans, and a toboggan slide half a mile long made out in Price’s Addition, starting at the top of the highest hill, where Lon’s big board sign with the painted bungalow made a fine windshield, and running across some very choice building lots to the foot of the grade, where it stopped on the proposed site of the Carnegie Library.  Lon was very keen about the sport himself after meeting Dulcie, and let a fire be built near his sign that burned it down one night, but he said it was all good advertising, more than he’d ever got out of being a Bohemian.