When
Society's belles and dames had completed a season's round of
dinner-parties and dances, they were more or less near to nervous
prostration, and Newport was the place which they had selected to
retire to and recuperate. It was an old-fashioned New England town,
not far from the entrance to Long Island Sound, and from a village
with several grocery shops and a tavern, it had been converted by a
magic touch of Society into the most famous and expensive resort in
the world. Estates had been sold there for as much as a dollar a
square foot, and it was nothing uncommon to pay ten thousand a month
for a "cottage."
The tradition of vacation and of the country was preserved in such
terms as "cottage." You would be invited to a "lawn-party," and you
would find a blaze of illumination, and potted plants enough to fill
a score of green-houses, and costumes and jewelled splendour
suggesting the Field of the Cloth of Gold. You would be invited to a
"picnic" at Gooseberry Point, and when you went there, you would
find gorgeous canopies spread overhead, and velvet carpets under
foot, and scores of liveried lackeys in attendance, and every luxury
one would have expected in a Fifth Avenue mansion.
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