That remarkable woman grasped the event in every aspect in about three minutes and a quarter. She knew--everyone in America knows everything--that Timothy Vandercrup, the editor of the _Gutter Snipe_, was her ally against Mrs. Palmer; she guessed also that the news would not reach Mrs. Palmer for some hours. So, within five minutes of the arrival of the telegram, she had called on Newport to rally round her, and sent out six hundred and fifty invitations for a ball two nights later--that is to say, on the evening of the first day of Mrs. Palmer's Revels. To each invitation she added on the bottom left-hand corner, 'Arrival of Prince of Saxe-Hochlaben.' That was rather clever; she did not actually commit herself to anything. The notes were sent out by a perfect army of special messengers, and the same evening all the answers arrived. There were no refusals. Simultaneously she wrote a rather familiar little note to H. R. T., whom she had met and flirted with in England the year before, saying: 'Pray come up to our little cottage here. We have a ball on Monday night. All Newport will be there.' At Mon Repos the same evening the papers arrived as usual, and Mrs. Palmer (as usual) picked up the _Gutter Snipe_, since it always contained the manoeuvres of the enemy. And, though at that moment her guests were in the middle of arriving, she left Amelie to do the honours, instantly left the room, went to her boudoir, and read the paragraph through twice. She also, it may be remarked, had met the Prince before; he had tried to flirt with Amelie, who had given him no encouragement whatever. But he had tried to flirt with so many people who had given him a great deal that she thought he might easily have forgotten that. She sat with the paper in her hands for some five minutes, after she had read it through for the second time, her nimble brain leaping like a squirrel from bough to bough of possible policies, and she paused on each for a moment. The New York _Evening Startler_, for instance, would put in whatever she chose to send it, and she went so far as to seize a pen and write in capital letters: 'Mrs. Lewis S. Palmer refuses to receive Prince Fritz.' Then she sat still again and thought. That would not do; Newport would only laugh at her--the one thing she dreaded; for to be laughed at drives the nails into the coffin of social failure. Then suddenly all the tension and activity of her leaping brain relaxed, and she smiled to herself at the extreme simplicity of The Plan. She took one of her ordinary Revel invitation-cards out of her desk, on which the word 'Revels' was printed at the bottom left-hand corner. Before this she inserted one word, so that it read 'Indiscriminate Revels.' That was all; she directed it to the Prince's address at the Waldorf, and went back to her guests.