Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/172

 with young people who had no sense of the past, tradition, were without manners, style, knew knothing about food, wine. It was as though the war to end war had killed civilization and made savages of this Younger Generation. Nowadays a party was a shindig at which one served, as he was serving, the Racketeer Piselli's acid New Jersey champagne, concocted from cider and God only knew what, and which even those who knew better swilled for its quick results. You couldn't give a party unless you guaranteed a hangover to every guest, especially the women. In Paris, Rome, Venice, costume balls had style because Europeans had a sense of period, manners, and went to some pains to help a host so as to amuse themselves. Not here, even when they try at a Beaux Arts ball. The women make the difference. Made up as tarts and wiggling around under their clinging gowns, their faces feverish and eyes darting everywhere to catch any man including the band-leader Chigger Cane who was singing at them "Aggravating Papa Don't You Two-Time Me!" The women from the theatre were the best, outladying the ladies. At least they knew how to be tarts without being offensively vulgar. He preferred them to the daughters of his own class who thought it unnoticed when they slipped away using his home as a house of assignation.

Raymond San Figente prided himself on being an authority, not only on social behavior but of all the arts old and new, and in the refinements of debauchery. He had no objection whatever to women being tarts, Lesbians, or virgins. In fact, considering himself fastidious, he found distasteful even the thought of women in their natural role. Debauchery, he thought, should be practiced by an artist, with the delicate nuances one found in a great painting, a Mantegna for example. The artist in debauchery had to possess a sense of what was unfitting at a fitting moment. He believed he had inherited this talent from his noble Italian father who had had the grace to die young enough to halt total dissipation of his American wife's considerable fortune. To spite her deceased husband and his family for indifference to her virtues save the one of having money, Figente's mother, the Princess San Figente, had abandoned Rome, temporal and spiritual, removing with her Raymond aged ten and baby Alice home to New York. Feeling justified in breaking her promise that the two would be brought up Catholics, because her husband had violated his marital vows, she engaged a high-minded Protestant theological student to tutor Raymond in the virtues of a non-decadent Protestant America. She had felt confirmed in her 160