Page:Bobbie, General Manager (1913).djvu/314

304 thousand dollars; the distance around the house and adjoining buildings added together measures half a mile; the big entrance hall, we state (and we're proud of our knowledge too) is hung with old tapestries and furnished in carved English oak.

After Mrs. F. Rockridge Sewall's advent, there was established among the Hilton summer colonists a new law of society. You were either of the elect or of the rejected; you were either entertained by Mrs. F. Rockridge Sewall or you were an ignominious nobody. There existed no self-respecting middle position in Hilton after Mrs. Sewall arrived in mid-July with her retinue of some twenty-odd servants, her four or five automobiles, and half-dozen hunters. Mrs. Sewall was for some time a very disturbing factor in Edith's life. The lights of a ballroom, the sound of dance-music, however lovely they may be, are absolutely irritating to my sister-in-law, if seen and heard from the outside. It took two long discouraging seasons of scheming, manipulating, and rather bold attacking, before Edith gained the proper kind of entrance to the hallowed ground inside those five-thousand-dollar wrought-iron gates. It was really due to Ruth that she was admitted then. Young Breckenridge Sewall had chanced to see a stunning young creature in lavender and grey at a garden-party at Mrs. Leonard Jackson's, one afternoon late in August, during his mother's second season at Grassmere, the name of their place in Hilton. He had only to see Ruth once to beg for an introduction. That is the way it is with every man across whose field of vision my sister steps. I think that Ruth is the loveliest production that Hilton, or