“Don’t think of it, Vandy,” he replied.  “We are short, and Art is long.”

Medora ate strange viands and drank elderberry wine that they poured in her glass.  It was just the color of that in the Vermont home.  The waiter poured something in another glass that seemed to be boiling, but when she tasted it it was not hot.  She had never felt so light-hearted before.  She thought lovingly of the Green Mountain farm and its fauna.  She leaned, smiling, to Miss Elise.

“If I were at home,” she said, beamingly, “I could show you the cutest little calf!”

“Nothing for you in the White Lane,” said Miss Elise.  “Why don’t you pad?”

The orchestra played a wailing waltz that Medora had learned from the hand-organs.  She followed the air with nodding head in a sweet soprano hum.  Madder looked across the table at her, and wondered in what strange waters Binkley had caught her in his seine.  She smiled at him, and they raised glasses and drank of the wine that boiled when it was cold.  Binkley had abandoned art and was prating of the unusual spring catch of shad.  Miss Elise arranged the palette-and-maul-stick tie pin of Mr. Vandyke.  A Philistine at some distant table was maundering volubly either about Jerome or Gerome.  A famous actress was discoursing excitably about monogrammed hosiery.  A hose clerk from a department store was loudly proclaiming his opinions of the drama.  A writer was abusing Dickens.  A magazine editor and a photographer were drinking a dry brand at a reserved table.  A 36-25-42 young lady was saying to an eminent sculptor:  “Fudge for your Prax Italys!  Bring one of your Venus Anno Dominis down to Cohen’s and see how quick she’d be turned down for a cloak model.  Back to the quarries with your Greeks and Dagos!”

Thus went Bohemia.

At eleven Mr. Binkley took Medora to the boarding-house and left her, with a society bow, at the foot of the hall stairs.  She went up to her room and lit the gas.

And then, as suddenly as the dreadful genie arose in vapor from the copper vase of the fisherman, arose in that room the formidable shape of the New England Conscience.  The terrible thing that Medora had done was revealed to her in its full enormity.  She had sat in the presence of the ungodly and looked upon the wine both when it was red and effervescent.

At midnight she wrote this letter: 

   “MR. BERIAH HOSKINS, Harmony, Vermont.

“Dear Sir:  Henceforth, consider me as dead to you forever.  I have loved you too well to blight your career by bringing into it my guilty and sin-stained life.  I have succumbed to the insidious wiles of this wicked world and have been drawn into the vortex of Bohemia.  There is scarcely any depth of glittering iniquity that I have not sounded.  It is hopeless to combat my decision.  There is no rising from the depths to which I have sunk.  Endeavor to forget me.  I am lost forever in the fair but brutal maze of awful Bohemia.  Farewell.

   “ONCE YOUR MEDORA.”