Flaming Youth WARNER FABIAN [Illustration: Logo] BONI AND LIVERIGHT PUBLISHERS NEW YORK Copyright 1922-1923, By BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc. _Printed in the United States of America_ First Printing, January, 1923 Second Printing, February, 1923 Third Printing, February, 1923 Fourth Printing, March, 1923 Fifth Printing, March, 1923 A WORD FROM THE WRITER TO THE READER: "Those who know will not tell; those who tell do not know." The old saying applies to woman in to-day's literature. Women writers when they write of women, evade and conceal and palliate. Ancestral reticences, sex loyalties, dissuade the pen. Men writers when they write of women, do so without comprehension. Men understand women only as women choose to have them, with one exception, the family physician. He knows. He sees through the body to the soul. But he may not tell what he sees. Professional honour binds him. Only through the unaccustomed medium of fiction and out of the vatic incense-cloud of pseudonymity may he speak the truth. Being a physician, I must conceal my identity, and, not less securely, the identity of those whom I picture. There is no such suburb as Dorrisdale ... and there are a score of Dorrisdales. There is no such family as the Fentrisses ... and there are a thousand Fentriss families. For the delineation which I have striven to present, honestly and unreservedly, of the twentieth century woman of the luxury-class I beg only the indulgence permissible to a neophyte's pen. I have no other apologia to offer. To the woman of the period thus set forth, restless, seductive, greedy, discontented, craving sensation, unrestrained, a little morbid, more than a little selfish, intelligent, uneducated, sybaritic, following blind instincts and perverse fancies, slack of mind as she is trim of body, neurotic and vigorous, a worshipper of tinsel gods at perfumed altars, fit mate for the hurried, reckless and cynical man of the age, predestined mother of--what manner of being?: To Her I dedicate this study of herself. W. F. FLAMING YOUTH PART I CHAPTER I The room was vital with air and fresh with the scent of many flowers. It was a happy room, a loved room, even a petted room. There was about it a sense of stir, of life, of habitual holiday. Some rooms retain these echoes. People say of them that they have character or express individuality. But this one's character was composite, possessing attributes of the many who had come and gone and laughed and played and perhaps loved there, at the behest of its mistress. A captious critic might have complained that it was over-crowded. The same critic might have said the same of Mona Fentriss's life.