The Argosy, Vol. 76, No. 3 — page 238: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

108 “You'll never see that lease. again,” jeered Mr. Roberts and Mr. Burton. “Nobody is going to pay eight hun- dred dollars a month for any bunga- low from here to Frisco." | But Sally stoutly defended her client. “ It will be back in two days,” she insisted. And it was. Moreover, it was accompanied by a certified check for the first month’s rent, signed by Violet M. Charteris. _“ And it was my horseshoe pin that did it,” groaned Mr. Burton, as Sally - waved the check triumphantly in his face. “Why didn’t the pesky thing ever do such a turn for me, I won- der?” Sally laughed. “Tl tell you when I come back,’ she answered gaily. “T’m going to go and pay this check to Mrs. Bartlett this minute. She’s planning to take Mr. Bartlett’s sister and go to the south of France for the winter. She’s not a bit well.” Mrs. Bartlett was not in, but the next day a jubilant note arrived, en- closing Sally’s commission and_ re- questing her to come up and drink a cup of tea with her “ grateful Mary Westwood Bartlett.’’ Business was rushing on the one side, however, and pleasure on the other, so it was almost three weeks before the celebration came off, and the moving time was close at hand. The postponed tea, however, was excellent; so were the sandwiches and cake which accompanied it; but the refreshments might almost as_ well have been hay infusion and hard tack, so absorbed were the two young wom- en in chanting the glories of a winter in southern France and the angelic charms of Mrs. Ronald Charteris. _ Upon this love-feast entered Mrs. Harvey Wentworth Porter, very im- posing of appearance, but very short of breath, and gasping out threaten- ings and slaughter above her two-and- a-half pink chins—the half being the original one. “Sarah Louise Reynolds!” she snorted. “ You here? I declare if THE ARGOSY. I hadn’t played dolls with your mother I wouldn’t speak to you. Have you any realizing sense at all of what you’ve done for Chichester’s most exclusive society and for poor Mary Bartlett most of all?” “Poor Mary Bartlett” gasped in her turn, and “Sarah Louise Rey- nolds ’”’ followed suit. “You don’t either of you know?” inquired Mrs. Porter, sinking into a chair and abandoning herself to the delight of imparting information. “Well, I hate to be the one to break it to you”—Mrs. Porter cer- tainly qualified for the Sapphira So- ciety at that moment — “but I sup- pose somebody must. “Mr. Porter has just come back from New York, my dear—came this morning, and he was full of some- thing that he heard down there. He was having dinner at the St. Regis with a lot of men, and in trailed that Mrs. Charteris, Sally here had in tow so long. “And as soon as they saw her one of the men began telling what he called ‘the best joke ever on the four hundred of Chichester ’—vulgar thing! He said, Mary Bartlett, that some ‘poor fool’ had rented her a house in the center of the fashionable district, right by the tennis club, and ‘adjoining John Westwood’s.’ “There’s no possibility of mistake, my dear, for they all seemed to know her; and she’s the most notorious woman in New York! She’s Violet Marvin — the woman that won that scandalous breach-of-promise suit two years ago, you remember. “ She’s married a man named: Char- teris since, she claims, and divorced him; but they call her Champagne Vi usually, my dear, because she bathes every day in a full tub of champagne! Does it for her complexion! “And that woman, Mary Bartlett, is going to live for months in your sweet little house — filling your tubs full of champagne and Heaven knows what all, and she’s going to camp COMicdoo S CO@