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By Root 1817 0

can shove, snipe, gossip, and gorge with an abandon that the amused onlooker might find fascinating but the unfortunate interloper will deem nothing short of deplorable. I was one such interloper on Sunday evening, the twenty-first of June. Kreizler had asked me (strangely, it seemed even then) to meet him not at Seventeenth Street but in his box at the Metropolitan before the benefit performance, making it necessary for me to take a cab to the “yellow brewery” and then fight my way up the house’s narrow staircases alone. Absolutely nothing brings out the killer instinct in the upper crust of New York Society like a charity function; and as I squeezed and pushed through the vestibule, trying to coax movement out of grandes dames whose clothing and physical proportions were suited only to stationary pursuits, I occasionally ran into people I’d known during my childhood, friends of my parents who now turned away quickly when they caught my eye, or simply bowed in a minimal way that declared unmistakably, “Please, spare me the embarrassment of actually having to speak with you.” All of which was fine as far as I was concerned, except that they generally wouldn’t then step aside and allow me to get by. By the time I reached the building’s second tier my nerves, along with my clothes, had been thrown into disarray, while my ears were ringing with the din of several thousand perfectly idiotic conversations. Remedy was at hand, however: I sliced my way through to one of the pocket bars under a staircase, downed a quick glass of champagne, grabbed hold of two more, and then made directly and determinedly for Kreizler’s box.

I found Laszlo already in it, studying the evening’s program as he sat in one of the rear seats. “My God!” I said, falling into a chair next to him without spilling a drop of my champagne. “I haven’t seen anything like this since Ward McAllister died! You don’t suppose he’s risen from the grave, do you?” (For the benefit of my younger readers, Ward McAllister had been Mrs. Astor’s social éminence grise, the man who actually devised the Four Hundred system, basing it on the number of people who could fit comfortably into that great lady’s ballroom.)

“Let’s hope not,” Laszlo answered, turning to me with a welcoming—and welcome—smile. “Though one can never be truly certain about such creatures as McAllister. Well, Moore!” He put his program aside and rubbed his hands together, continuing to look much happier and healthier than he had during our last several encounters. He eyed my champagne. “You appear to be well prepared for an evening among the wolves.”

“Yes, they’re all out tonight, aren’t they?” I said, scanning the Diamond Horseshoe. I started to move to a forward seat, but Kreizler held me back.

“If you wouldn’t mind, Moore, I’d prefer that we sat in the back, tonight.” To my questioning look he answered, “I’m in no mood to be scrutinized this evening.”

I shrugged and resettled myself next to him, then continued to investigate the audience, turning soon to box 35. “Ah, I see Morgan’s brought his wife. Some poor actress will be out a diamond bracelet or two tonight, I suspect.” I looked down at the sea of bobbing heads below us. “Where in hell are they going to put all the people who are still outside—the orchestra seats are already full.”

“It’ll be a miracle if we can even hear the performance,” Kreizler said, with a laugh that puzzled me—it wasn’t the sort of thing he would usually have found amusing. “The Astor box is so overloaded it looks as though it’ll collapse, and the Rutherford boys were already too drunk to stand at seven-thirty!”

I’d taken out my folding glasses and was scrutinizing the other side of the horseshoe. “Quite a gaggle of girls in the Clews’ box,” I said. “They don’t look precisely like they came to hear Maurel. High-stakes husband-hunting, would be my guess.”

“The guardians of the social order,” Kreizler said, holding his right hand out toward the house with a sigh. “On parade, and don’t they make a sight!”

After giving Kreizler a baffled glance I said, “You’re in a rather