New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction
In truth, she found the Lorillardian absence of formality, constraint
and regulated behavior a decided relief after her long course of
Calvinistic repression at home. And, active though she was by nature,
she did not at first notice how the days slipped by with great ado, but
with very little done.
The Lorillard tenementers were not exactly lazy. They were merely idle.
Like the idle rich and the idle poor they were ceaselessly occupied—in
killing time.
Cornelia was in the habit of getting up somewhere between nine and
eleven. After breakfast, the two friends would set out to look for a
job. The spirit in which they proceeded was the spirit in which young
people go skylarking. Hunting for a job was an old pastime of
Cornelia’s. If she ever came up to a job’s requirements, the job never
came up to hers. Or if by chance it did, she discovered a bewildering
array of reasons for not taking it, or for speedily leaving it, when
taken.
At noon, the day’s duty was considered fully done. After lunch, there
was another jaunt; this time to an art gallery, concert hall, theatre or
movie. Free tickets from Cornelia’s theatrical friends were reasonably
plentiful, and when these failed, there were return calls to pay.
Thus, Charlotte Beecher’s studio was a favorite stopping place, as Janet
soon discovered. Charlotte possessed a million dollars or more in her
own right, and she had three or four studios in totally different parts
of the city. She did her hardest work in her double Lorillard flat
every morning; her evenings were spent warding off fortune-hunting
suitors like Denman Page, who besieged her Fifth Avenue apartment; on
certain afternoons she served an "intellectual tea" in a studio
sumptuously fitted up in Washington Mews.
Janet was always taken to the studio _de luxe_ in the Mews. Cornelia,
invariably busy, would be sketching some new design of a hat, or pinning
together a one-piece dress, whilst she luxuriated happily amidst the
rich Chinese rugs and the soft silken cushions of Charlotte’s show room.
The serpent in this garden of Eden was the "little group of serious
thinkers" (an element alien to Kips Bay) that met in the Mews by virtue
of Charlotte’s encouragement.
"These intellectuals!" Cornelia would say scornfully to Janet on the way
home. "Did you ever hear such bumptious talk?"
"I find them rather amusing," Janet would perhaps reply.
"Araminta, what nonsense! They positively put the furniture on edge.
But that’s Charlotte all over. There’s a nigger in every woodpile, and
there’s a jarring note in every one of Charlotte’s rooms. My dear, it
bores me cruelly."
Still, Cornelia went on visiting the Mews, intellectuals, cruel boredom,
and all. It puzzled Janet for a time. She had still to learn that a
perfect Kipsite is prepared to suffer no end of martyrdom in the sacred
cause of luxury.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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