“Exactly! Madame is her model. Her aping is more like monkeying, but the resemblance is not lost. New Yorkers rather enjoy the sublime audacity of Madame’s fleecing, and she _does_ have the _entrée_ of uppertendom, sham though she is, with her drawing-room readings, where geniuses are trotted out at big prices to ticket buyers, and no price at all to Madame, and ranchmen’s daughters are provided with blue-blooded Knickerbocker husbands. Her schemes are on a large scale. She engineers benevolent pow-wows, clears her one thousand dollars a night, and nobody dare charge her with pocketing a penny. You can see where Kit learned her trade. To my certain knowledge she dresses herself and pays for all her hospitable entertainments by these tricks.” “Her latest investment isn’t a bad notion, but Kit is working the scheme for all it’s worth. Anybody but the newest of the new would see through the game.” The other laughed gratingly. “‘New’ is a mild way of putting it. We call her ‘Kit’s windfall’ at our Club. Madame’s disciple had, as she fondly imagined, netted a couple of veritable musical lions, and ten people were invited to hear their after-dinner roar. The very day before the feast the male lion fell sick, and the lioness wouldn’t or couldn’t leave her mate. Kitty was tearing her false bang over the note apprising her of the disaster when a card was brought in, telling her that an old schoolmate who had been educated as a music-teacher, and had a niceish talent for recitation, had removed to the city. Kit caught at the straw; raced around to inspect her, judged her to be more than eligible, and roped her in. Delorme was at the dinner and told me the story, which his wife had from Kit’s own lips. The new ‘find’ had beauty as well as a voice and a taste for theatricals, and a neat income, so Kit says—some thirty thousand a year. Moreover, she is tremendously grateful for the lift in the world, and so daft with enjoyment of her first glimpse of _le bon ton_ that she would send Kit ten out of the thirty thousand sooner than lose her social standing. She doesn’t guess that she will be tossed aside like a squeezed orange next year, poor thing!”