By one bold leap Mrs. Radigan has landed herself among the smartest of the smart and has fixed herself there so firmly that heaven and earth cannot move her as long as she holds on to her money. She staked all and won. If she failed to become a smart woman, there was that dreadful alternative of being a club woman, but she risked it. She is safe now. Her husband can abscond or can sue for divorce, she can sue for divorce or can become totally demented, they can abandon each other and their son can abandon them, but as long as the great Radigan fortune hangs together they will be smart. And after all that adjective is not misused, for it is money that makes people interesting in this world. We will listen with bated breath to the twaddle of a multi-millionaire, while we would yawn in the face of a college professor. Everybody says the Radigans are interesting. Those who knew them in their poorer days must have thought them dull. I said that Mrs. Radigan risked all. That is not exaggeration. When I heard how she had rented Flurry's entire establishment for an evening, and calmly sent out invitations to a dance, I shuddered. "Why, that great ballroom will look like Asbury Park in December," said I, "unless you have made some foolish blunder like asking your old friends." "Never," she answered firmly. "I have made a list of just 600 names. My annual ball is to be a great gathering of all the clans, you see. Then I want to give it a cosmopolitan tinge, so I have asked representatives of each of the trades: one actress, one author, one artist, one clergyman, and a college professor. You see it will look as though I were able to ask just whom I chose, in spite of their social position." With that she handed me a press copy of her list, and as my eye ran from name to name, I groaned. There was hardly a perfumery, a brokerage house, a breakfast-food, a real-estate firm, a bank, or a business combination of any kind in the city that was not represented. "Why, these are the smartest people in town!" I cried. "And I am sure you don't know one-tenth of the lot, and that only half that number know you. How many do you think will come?" "I cannot guess," she said calmly. "The cards went out only yesterday. It is a gamble, of course. If nobody comes, we shall move to Riverside Drive. If everybody comes, we go on with our new house on the avenue."