XI

SARATOGA

It was the 22d of August, and the height of the season at Saratoga.  Familiar as King had been with these Springs, accustomed as the artist was to foreign Spas, the scene was a surprise to both.  They had been told that fashion had ceased to patronize it, and that its old-time character was gone.  But Saratoga is too strong for the whims of fashion; its existence does not depend upon its decrees; it has reached the point where it cannot be killed by the inroads of Jew or Gentile.  In ceasing to be a society centre, it has become in a manner metropolitan; for the season it is no longer a provincial village, but the meeting-place of as mixed and heterogeneous a throng as flows into New York from all the Union in the autumn shopping period.

It was race week, but the sporting men did not give Saratoga their complexion.  It was convention time, but except in the hotel corridors politicians were not the feature of the place.  One of the great hotels was almost exclusively occupied by the descendants of Abraham, but the town did not at all resemble Jerusalem.  Innumerable boarding-houses swarmed with city and country clergymen, who have a well-founded impression that the waters of the springs have a beneficent relation to the bilious secretions of the year, but the resort had not an oppressive air of sanctity.  Nearly every prominent politician in the State and a good many from other States registered at the hotels, but no one seemed to think that the country was in danger.  Hundreds of men and women were there because they had been there every year for thirty or forty years back, and they have no doubt that their health absolutely requires a week at Saratoga; yet the village has not the aspect of a sanitarium.  The hotel dining-rooms and galleries were thronged with large, overdressed women who glittered with diamonds and looked uncomfortable in silks and velvets, and Broadway was gay with elegant equipages, but nobody would go to Saratoga to study the fashions.  Perhaps the most impressive spectacle in this lowly world was the row of millionaires sunning themselves every morning on the piazza of the States, solemn men in black broadcloth and white hats, who said little, but looked rich; visitors used to pass that way casually, and the townspeople regarded them with a kind of awe, as if they were the king-pins of the whole social fabric; but even these magnates were only pleasing incidents in the kaleidoscopic show.

The first person King encountered on the piazza of the Grand Union was not the one he most wished to see, although it could never be otherwise than agreeable to meet his fair cousin, Mrs. Bartlett Glow.  She was in a fresh morning toilet, dainty, comme il faut, radiant, with that unobtrusive manner of “society” which made the present surroundings, appear a trifle vulgar to King, and to his self-disgust forced upon him the image of Mrs. Benson.