Excerpt from The Massarenes: A Novel
"Mouse," said her husband to Lady Kenilworth, one morning at Homburg, "do you see that large pale woman over there, with a face like a crumpled whitey-brown paper bag?"
Lady Kenilworth looked.
"Yes," she said, impatiently. "Yes. Well? - what? - why?"
"Well, she rolls - she absolutely rolls - wallows - biggest pile ever made out West."
His wife looked again with a little more attention at the large figure of a lady, superbly clothed, who sat alone under a tree, and had that desolate air of "not being in t" which betrays the unelect.
"Nobody discovered her? Nobody taken her up?" she asked, still looking through her eye-glass.
"Well, old Khris a little; but Khris can't get anybody on now. He does 'em more harm than good. He's dead broke."
His wife smiled.
"They must be new, indeed, if they don't know that. Would they be rich enough to buy Vale Royal of Gerald?"
"Lord, yes; rich enough to buy a hundred Gerrys and Vales Royal. I know it for a fact from men in the City: they are astonishing-biggest income in the United States, after Vanderbilt and Pullman."
"American, then?"
"No; made their 'stiff' there, and come home to spend it."
"Name?"