Page:A hairdresser's experience in high life.djvu/52

54 wine-room, and then the great dining-room, within the door of which stands, like a polite statue, the ever majestic Morris, the steward of the household. The gentlemen's promenade skirts the dining-room, and leads off in a triangular direction to a long smoking gallery, which divides the dining-room from the ladies' parlor, opposite to which is the ladies' promenade. Here the fair votaries of fashion can be distinctly seen by the occupants of the smoking gallery, and commented on to their heart's content. Besides these two promenades, there is again a general promenade, fronting in another direction from the hotel, which is so commodious as to admit of eight hundred or a thousand promenaders at once, without the least crush of crinoline or inconvenience whatever. This promenade is kept so scrupulously clean and neat, that ladies have worn their dresses sweeping over it for the whole season, and then passed them off as quite fresh and new at other watering-places.

The groups of ladies and gentlemen assembled upon this immense piazza pass their time usually in comments upon each other; and here, of all the world, is the place for diamonds, brocades and satins to make a sensation. A lady might as well stay at home as to go to Saratoga without real lace and diamonds; there was a time when a lady could hire jewelry for the season, and thus impose herself upon the elite circles at the "United States Hotel" for, at least, a person of wealth, very successfully. But lynx-eyed fashion found this trick out, and wouldn't stand it; since which a lady's diamonds must be her own, or she can't shine at Saratoga; and so perfect is the system now of investigation into these matters practiced at