Empire

is deeply distressed.”

“I’ve not met her, you know.”

Mrs. Astor’s dark stare was curiously disconcerting. She looked at Caroline as if, indeed, Caroline were an actress on stage and she the critical audience when, Caroline was certain-or was she?-that it ought to be the other way around. “That is right. You had different mothers. I knew both. Your mother I knew very slightly. She was dark-like you. She was the Princesse d’Agrigente. Then Denise Delacroix Sanford died, and your mother married your father.”

“Yes, I know the sequence intimately.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Astor. “I suppose you must.”

Harry Lehr then amused everyone; and the tea was over.

At midnight Broadway resembled itself at noon, except that the millions of white electrical lights used to spell out the names of theaters and plays, lacking all color, drained Broadway of color, too. There was something arctic about the scene, thought Caroline, as the carriage entered Longacre Square, a lozenge-shaped area whose south end was dominated by an odd triangle of a building. At midnight the square was almost as crowded as at noon. Streetcars rattled by; carriages stopped and started, as the night people got in, got out.

Blaise was entirely at home, thought Caroline, with a twinge of envy. She was still a foreigner; he was already a New Yorker. At the theater, he pointed out all sorts of New York figures in the audience, including a man who invariably bet a million dollars on almost anything, and another man, very fat and covered with diamonds, who ate a dozen dinners a day but drank only orange juice, a gallon at each meal.

“Here’s Rector’s.” Blaise was at his most attractive when he was excited, and New York excited him-electrified him, she thought, feeling a dozen years his senior. But despite her own new gravitas, she had enjoyed the play almost as much as the intermissions. Neither had mentioned the will; presumably, over supper, they would begin their business, and she would ignore her cousin’s warning.

Rector’s occupied a low yellow-brick building between Forty-third and Forty-fourth Streets on the east side of Longacre Square. Over the doorway hung an electrical griffin. “There’s no other sign,” Blaise explained happily. “Everyone knows this is Rector’s.”

As Caroline entered Rector’s the orchestra was playing what she had come to think of as the city’s anthem: “There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” She was not certain whether the war had made the song popular, or the other way around. In either case, she preferred this jaunty tune to the lachrymose “The Rosary.” A thick, heavy man-but then all New York men were thick, heavy-Mr. Rector himself greeted Blaise; and was pleased, if somewhat surprised, to learn that Caroline was his sister. “We’ll put you in the back, Mr. Sanford. A quiet table.”

“Has Mr. Hearst been in?”

“No, sir. But the evening’s young.”

They sat facing one another across a corner table. The room was overheated, and smelled of roast beef and cigar smoke.

“You’ll like the Chief. At least I think you will.”

“Mrs. Astor-”

“Oh, those people hate him. You see, he does everything his own way. They really hate that, you know. They also can’t believe it. Like Brooklyn Bridge…” The maitre d’hotel took their order for supper. Although Caroline could not get enough of Long Island’s oysters, she disliked France’s allegedly more delicate and distinctive oysters. The Atlantic was colder here than there; or so someone had said, trying to explain to her the crucial difference. Meanwhile, she ate as many oysters as she dared.

“What about Brooklyn Bridge?” Meekly Caroline accepted every delay that Blaise saw fit to contrive; and he was in a delaying mood. She had also begun, almost idly, to wonder what he was really like. She had, of course, analyzed him to their Sanford cousin, but even as she had held so sententiously forth on Blaise’s form of ambition, she now realized that she hardly knew this sharp-faced, high-colored blond youth sitting opposite her. They had been apart too often. Was he, for instance, in love with anyone? Or was he what Mrs. Astor’s circle called a libertine? Or was he simply interested in himself, in thrall to his own energy as she was to hers?

Blaise told her about the Brooklyn Bridge. “The Chief decided that after all the fuss about the bridge-you know, the biggest and the best and so on-that the bridge was about to fall down. So we ran a series on how it’s about to collapse. Lovely stuff. Except there was nothing wrong with the bridge. Then when people found out that the bridge was safe, everyone was so mad at the Chief that he goes and publishes a big front-page story, saying that Brooklyn Bridge is safe at last, thanks to the Journal. It was a wonderful series!”

“Doesn’t it bother…” Caroline shifted tactfully from “you” to, “him that these things aren’t true?”

Blaise shrugged; and looked, momentarily, French. “It’s just for circulation. No one cares. There’s always another story tomorrow. Anyway, he makes things happen.”

“You mean, they seem to happen.”

“It’s all the same here. It’s not like other places. Where’s Del?”

“In New Hampshire, I think.”

“You like him?” Again the bright blue eager stare.

“Do you like him?” Caroline was curious.

“Yes. He’s very-old-fashioned, I guess. Is he going to work, or is he just going to be a clubman?”

“Oh, he’ll work, I suppose. He talks about the law. He talks about the diplomatic service.”

“Well, he’s set up there. Old Hay’s back on top.”

“Old Hay is not so well, I think. I liked them, the old people, this summer.”

“I can’t stand old people.” Blaise scowled. “They always act like they are judging us.”

“I don’t think they notice us at all.”

“Oh, they do! They notice the Chief anyway. The only old person he knows is his mother, and she’s jolly enough, for an old lady.”

“I hadn’t realized that you had developed this phobia for-old folks.”

“It’s New York!” Blaise grinned. “It’s the only place to be young in.”

“Well, I intend to do my best,” said Caroline, ready now to broach the delicate subject. But the one person in all New York who ought never to know their business approached the table. It was the infamous Colonel William D’Alton Mann. Florid, white-bearded, definitely elderly and thus entirely unacceptable to Blaise, the gentle-seeming Colonel, whose style of address was antebellum courtly-he had actually been a colonel in the war-was known to all New York as the city’s preeminent blackmailer. He published the irresistible weekly Town Topics, where, as “the Saunterer,” he confided to his readers a man-about-town’s inside knowledge of society’s dark side. The Saunterer gave the impression that he was more than eager to print not only devastating truths but ingenious libels about the rich and powerful. But this vivid impression was, largely, for effect. In actual fact, a truth too devastating or a libel too ingenious would first be submitted to the victim, who then had the opportunity to buy off the Colonel, usually with a loan of money, at a nominal interest rate, that became, in due course, a thoroughly bad debt. Smaller truths and minor libels were kept out of print by the payment of fifteen hundred dollars a year for a subscription to the Colonel’s luxurious annual volume, called, rather pointedly, Fads and Fancies of Representative Americans. Caroline was delighted to meet a villain of such stature. Blaise was less than pleased.

“Dear boy,” said the Colonel, seating himself uninvited in an empty chair beside Caroline. “How I revel in what the Chief is doing to the Secretary of War. Mr. Alger is indeed a murderer, just as the Chief says, killing American soldiers with poisoned beef, the same old trick that was played on us who fought in the War Between the States. You must give him my compliments. He is the best thing to happen to journalism since-”

“Since Town Topics was revived by you,” said Caroline, eager to show that she was up-to-date. To her pleasure the Colonel’s dull red face began to take on a purple coloring at the edge of the snow- white whiskers.

Colonel Mann was all honey. “How rare it is to find a young lady who appreciates-well, courage, I suppose is the word.”

“That’s one word,” said Blaise.

“The word,” said Caroline. “I can’t get enough of your newspaper, and I don’t know why so many people I know are made uneasy by your… saunterings.” Caroline flattered.

“I am, at times,” the Colonel’s confession gave every appearance of shyness, “unkind, even-yes, a fault