"Then there's Mona Leslie, who might have been a true Honeybee if everybody belonging to her hadn't died too soon, leaving her hopeless numbers of millions. Mona, for some reason, has taken a passing fancy to me; all her fancies pass. She sings like an angel, and might have made a career--if it had seemed worth while. It never has. Nothing has, but vivid sensation--from ascetic religion to sloppy love; and, at thirty, she's exhausted the whole show. So she spends her time now in a mad duel with boredom. Poor woman! Luckily the fairies gave her a selfishly kind heart, and there's a piece of it left, I think. It may even win the duel for her in the end. More and more she's the reckless patron of all the arts, almost smothering ennui under her benefactions. She'd smother poor me, too, if I'd let her; but I can't; I'm either not brazen enough or not Christian enough to let her patronize me for her own amusement. And that's her one new sensation for the last three years! "Still, I've one thing to thank her for, and I wish I could feel grateful. She introduced me, at one of her Arabian-Nightish _soirées musicales_, to Hadow Bury, proprietor of _Whim_, the smarty-party weekly review. In two years it's made a sky-rocketing success, by printing the harum-scarumest possible comment on all the social and æsthetic fads and freaks of the day--just the iris froth of the wave, that and that only. Hadow's a big, black, bleak man-mountain. You'd take him for an undertaker by special appointment to coal-beef-and-iron kings. You'd never suspect him of having capitalized the Frivolous. But he's found it means bagfuls of reelers for him, so he takes it seriously. He's after the _goods_. He gets and delivers the goods, no matter what they cost. He's ready to pay any price now for a new brand of cerebral champagne. "Well, I didn't know _what_ he was when Mona casually dropped me beside him, but he loomed so big and black and bleak he frightened me--till my thoughts chattered! I rattled on--like this, Jimmy--only not because I wanted to, but because having madly started I didn't know how to stop. I made a fool of myself--utter; with the result that he detected a slightly different flavor in my folly, a possibly novel _bouquet_--let's call it the 'Birch Street _bouquet_.' At any rate, he finally silenced me to ask whether I could write as I talked, and I said I hoped not; and he looked bleaker and blacker than ever and said that was the worst of it, so few amusing young women could! It seemed to be one of the more annoying laws of Nature.