WORLD'S END

The social whirl was now in full career. There were two or three smart dances every night; also people had taken to dancing at teas and at supper parties after the theater. The Argentine tango was the rage, also the maxixe - "a slide, a swing, and a throw away." In short, the town had gone dance-crazy, and some of the fetes were of magnificence such as you read about in the days of Marie Antoinette. The Duchess of Winterton turned the garden of her town house into a dancing pavilion, with a board platform and the shrubs and trees sticking through holes. With a rustic bandstand and colored lanterns at night it was a scene from the Vienna woods - but no waltzes, no, the music of a famous "nigger-band."

A half-grown boy wasn't invited to such affairs, but there were plenty of other things he could do to keep "in the swim." He could walk by Rotten Row, and see the great ladies and gentlemen of fashion in their riding costumes, and crowds of people lined up to stare, separated from them only by a wooden railing. He could go to hear the "bell-ringing" for the Queen's birthday. He could see the coaching parade; the smart gentlemen, and even one smart lady, driving fancy turnouts with four horses, an array of guests, and two grooms sitting in back as stiff as statues. He could attend the military tournament at Olympia, and see a score of riders charging at a long hurdle from opposite directions, all leaping over it at the same moment, passing each other in the air so close that the knees of the riders often touched.

Also Lanny was invited to ride on a coach with his mother's friends to the races on Derby Day. That was the time you really saw England. Three or four hundred thousand people came out to Epsom Downs, on trains, in carriages or motorcars, or in the huge rhotorbusses which were the new feature of the town. The roads were packed all day long, first going and then coming; Epsom was described as a vast garage, and people said that soon there would be no horses at the Derby except those in the races. The common people were out for a holiday, and ate and drank and laughed and shouted without regard to etiquette. The people of fashion were there to be looked at, and they put on the finest show that money could buy.

Everybody agreed that the styles for that summer of 1914 were the most extreme since the Restoration, the Grand Monarque, the Third Empire - whatever period of history sounded most impressive. Svelte contours were gone, and flufEness was the rule; waists were becoming slimmer, side panniers were coming back, flounces were multiplied beyond reason; skirts were tight - a cause of embarrassment to ladies ascending the steps of motorcars and coaches, and the moralists commented sternly upon the unseemly exhibitions which resulted. They complained also that the distinction between evening and day frocks was almost lost; really, flesh-pink chiffon was too intime for open air! Fete and race gowns were cut low at the throat, and materials worn over the arms were so diaphanous that they were hardly to be seen at all.

Those who aimed to be really smart did not heed the moralists, but they had to heed the weather; so with these scanty costumes went capes. Everyone agreed that it was a renaissance of the cape; Venetian capes, Cavalier capes, manteaux militaires, all made of the most exquisite materials, of silk and satin brocade, sometimes embroidered with great flowers, painted ninons and delicate doublures; the linings were velvet, always of the brightest colors, and the capes were weighted down with diamonds or other jewels, and held across the figure by straps of plaid silk or chiffon, with jeweled buckles of butterfly or flower design.

In short, the fancy of the dressmakers had been turned loose for many months, and the product was set up conspicuously on the tops of coaches or in open motorcars for the crowds to inspect. If they liked it they said so, and if they didn't they said it even louder. Fashionable society tittered over the misadventure of the Dowager Duchess of Gunpowder, a stout old lady who arrayed herself in pink taffeta, with a wide hat of soft straw covered with pink chiffon and roses, known as a "Watteau confection." In a traffic jam her carriage "was halted, and some navvies working by the road leaned on their shovels and had a good long look at the show. "Wot ho, Bill!" one of them shouted. "Wot price mutton dressed as lamb!"