Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 78: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

712 of its arrival has thrown off the hot and confining smartness imposed by French dressmaker and English tailor and garbed brilliantly, if not adequately, in pyjamas, comes forth to lie on the warm white sands. These pyjamas are so bright and gleaming in satin and shining brocade that it is al- most an insult to designate by the same term the garment worn by humble folk to sleep in of a night. Under the red and blue awnings of the little bath houses a solid row of gaudy tenements, are sheltered duchess and demimondaine, opera singers and debutantes, counts and card sharpers, actresses and international tennis stars, poverty-stricken royalties and _ affluent Americans, sleeping, eating, making love and playing games with the same disregard for privacy one finds in an Oriental ghetto. At night the terrace is agleam with col- ored lights and the faces and jewels of beautiful women, who dance languorous tangoes and swift fox-trots with a back- ground of faintly glimpsed blue sea and of iridescent fountain spray and a canopy of Italian stars that seem to hang heavy in the sky, as easily to be plucked as so many ripe figs. . To the uneasy American social climber essaying to walk the paths of glory with those who have had money for more than one or two generations, and finding the go- ing dificult, the Lido is a godsend for, in the month-long carnival that flourishes there, where all are relaxed, merry and at ease, acquaintances ripen quickly, and the playmate one finds at the Lido may be guide, mentor or dictator in New York. So the Otis Wheelwrights, newly of New York, made a yearly peregrination via Lon- don and Paris, time-honored route with the recently rich, to their palace in Venice, so that Janet, their only child, a gorgeous girl, might spend every day beneath the awn- ing of her bath house on the Excelsior’s beach collecting minor nobilities to be car- ried back to New York in the autumn and there exploited beneath her egis. Janet gave them a whirl through “ restaurant so- ciety,” hoping that some day she would be caught in the center of that whirl and sucked down to the quiet Empyrean of ex- clusive and long established New Yorkers. ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. Every summer Mamma Wheelwright wailed miserably that she did wish that Janet would be content to stay at the hotel and save her the trouble of opening and running the enormous house on the Grand Canal, but Janet, reveling in the beauty, mystery and magnificent decay, and in the distinction of being Miss Wheelwright of the Palazzo Effizzi, dragged her reluctant parents there year after year, filled the house with guests, and enjoyed herself, thoroughly unmoved by family protests or nervous breakdowns. Janet’s wish was law with the drab cou- ple who had amazingly produced a brilliant child, and had regarded her with wonder and a little fear ever since, so although they protested invariably, invariably they came. As Janet, with some elements of truth, said to her only confidante, the young Duchesse de Fouchard Roche: “TI enjoy myself at the Lido and mother enjoys being in Ven- ice. She invariably develops some interest- ing ailment that gives her an excuse for a new cure in Switzerland every fall, and she wouldn’t know what to do with herself ‘else. Besides, there has, never been anything mysterious about the Wheelwrights except my red hair, so once having got their hands on anything as intriguing as a haunted pal- ace they would be fools to let it go.” One August afternoon, so hot that even the sun-loving Italian sought the shade, and the Americans begged piteously for iced tea and electric fans, the Wheelwrights —mamma and papa—bored and perspir- ing, and Janet, radiant in green silk py- jamas, and their five guests, arrivals from Paris that morning, limp with their trip and the heat, lay relaxed, half asleep, on the cushions and couches under the bath- house awning. Never beforehand had Janet, for all her wealth and beauty and determination, induced so distinguished a foursome to stay with her; and lazily she studied them, the gleam of the successful hunter in her eyes. The fifth was more than negligible in her triumph, but in the good nature of her success she forgot the irritation with which she opposed his coming and forgave her father for his insistence in demanding his presence at this time. When a young lady Commicboooks (S@)