Alice divided her time between the Wallings and her costumiers, and every evening she came home with a new tale of important developments.  Alice was new at the game, and could afford to be excited; and Mrs. Robbie liked to see her bright face, and to smile indulgently at her eager inquiries.  Mrs. Robbie herself had given her orders to her steward and her florist and her secretary, and went on her way and thought no more about it.  That was the way of the great ladies—­or, at any rate, it was their pose.

The town-house of the Robbies was a stately palace occupying a block upon Fifth Avenue—­one of the half-dozen mansions of the Walling family which were among the show places of the city.  It would take a catalogue to list the establishments maintained by the Wallings—­there was an estate in North Carolina, and another in the Adirondacks, and others on Long Island and in New Jersey.  Also there were several in Newport—­one which was almost never occupied, and which Mrs. Billy Alden sarcastically described as “a three-million-dollar castle on a desert.”

Montague accompanied Alice once or twice, and had an opportunity to study Mrs. Robbie at home.  There were thirty-eight servants in her establishment; it was a little state all in itself, with Mrs. Robbie as queen, and her housekeeper as prime minister, and under them as many different ranks and classes and castes as in a feudal principality.  There had to be six separate dining-rooms for the various kinds of servants who scorned each other; there were servants’ servants and servants of servants’ servants.  There were only three to whom the mistress was supposed to give orders—­the butler, the steward, and the housekeeper; she did not even know the names of many of them, and they were changed so often, that, as she declared, she had to leave it to her detective to distinguish between employees and burglars.

Mrs. Robbie was quite a young woman, but it pleased her to pose as a care-worn matron, weary of the responsibilities of her exalted station.  The ignorant looked on and pictured her as living in the lap of ease, endowed with every opportunity:  in reality the meanest kitchen-maid was freer—­she was quite worn thin with the burdens that fell upon her.  The huge machine was for ever threatening to fall to pieces, and required the wisdom of Solomon and the patience of Job to keep it running.  One paid one’s steward a fortune, and yet he robbed right and left, and quarrelled with the chef besides.  The butler was suspected of getting drunk upon rare and costly vintages, and the new parlour-maid had turned out to be a Sunday reporter in disguise.  The man who had come every day for ten years to wind the clocks of the establishment was dead, and the one who took care of the bric-a-brac was sick, and the housekeeper was in a panic over the prospect of having to train another.