Page:The Relentless City.djvu/91

Rh number of little notes on to the floor over him, and he was now poor but spiteful.

The effect of his announcement was magical, for there was already war to the knife between Mrs. John Z. Adelboden and Mrs. Palmer, the latter of whom had planted her standard at Long Island in direct defiance of Newport; and those headlines brought things to a crisis. The news of his arrival was of course telegraphed to Newport by the Gutter Snipe, which did not telegraph it to Mon Repos. Consequently Mrs. John Z. Adelboden knew it by mid-day (the Germanic having come in at 11.49), whereas it went down to Long Island in the ordinary issue of the paper. Thus, Mrs. John Z. Adelboden had seven hours' start.

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, 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:

At Mon Repos the same evening the papers arrived as