Chapter CLXXVII: Section 14: Thyrsis went on to penetrate yet deeper into these

mysteries; there came a call from Murray Symington, to say that Mrs. Jesse Dyckman wanted him to dinner. Jesse Dyckman he recognized as the name of one of the most popular contributors to the magazines--his short stories of Fifth Avenue life were the delight of the readers of the “Beau Monde”.

“But I can’t go to dinner-parties with women!” protested Thyrsis. “I don’t dress!”

Murray took that message; but in a few minutes he called up again. “She says she doesn’t care whether you dress or not.”

“But then, I don’t _eat!_” protested Thyrsis, who had recently discovered Horace Fletcher.

“I know _that_ won’t count,” said the other, laughing. “She doesn’t want you to eat--she wants you to talk.”

Mrs. Jesse Dyckman inhabited an apartment in a “studio-building” not far from Central Park; and here was more luxury and charm--a dining-room done in dark red, with furniture of some black wood, and candles and silver and cut glass, quite after the fashion of the Macintyres. Thyrsis was admitted by a French maid-servant; and there was Mrs. Dyckman, resplendent in white shoulders and a necklace of pearls; and there was Dyckman himself, even more prosperous and contented-looking than his pictures, and even more brilliant and cynical than his tales. Also there was his sister, Mrs. Partridge, the writer of musical comedies; and a Miss Taylor, who filled the odd corners of the magazines with verses, which Corydon had once described as “cheap cheer-up stuff”.

So here was the cream of the “literary world”; and Thyrsis, as he watched and listened to it, was working out the formula of magazine success. Mrs. Dyckman sat next to him, displaying her shoulders and her culture; it seemed to him that she must have spent all her spare time picking up phrases about the books and pictures and plays and music of the hour, so as to be ready for possible mention of them at her dinner-parties. She had opinions on tap about everything; opinions just enough “advanced” to be striking and original, and yet not too far “advanced” for good form. Jesse Dyckman’s short stories were the sort in which you read how the hero handled his cigarette, and were told that the heroine was clad in “dimity _en princesse”_. You learned the names of the latest fashionable drinks, and the technicalities of automobiles, and met with references to far-off and intricate standards of social excellence.

To Thyrsis it appeared that he could see before him the whole career of such a man. He had trained himself by years of apprenticeship in snobbery; he had studied the fashions not only in costume and manners, but also in books and opinions. He had been educated in a “fraternity”, and had chosen a wife who had been educated in a “sorority”; they had set up in this apartment, with silver service and three French servants, and proceeded to give dinners, and cultivate people who “counted.” And so had come the pleasant berth with the “Beau Monde”; one or two stories every month, and one thousand dollars for each story--as one might read in all newspaper accounts of the “earnings of authors”.

The “Beau Monde” might have been described as a magazine for the standardizing of the newly-rich. A group of these existed in every town in the country, and had their “society” in every little city. They would come to New York and put up at expensive hotels, and get their education in theatres and opera-houses and “lobster-palaces”; in addition they had this weekly messenger of good form. In its advertising-columns one read of the latest things in cigarettes and highballs and haberdashery and candies and autos; and in its reading-matter one found the leisure-class world, and the leisure-class idea of all other worlds. Young Blanchard himself was in the most “exclusive” society; and if one stayed close to him, one might worm his way past the warders. Among the regular contributors to the “Beau Monde” and to “Macintyre’s”, there were a dozen men who had risen by this method; and some of them had been real writers at the outset--had started with a fund of vigor, at least. But now they spent their evenings at dinner-parties, and their days lounging about in two or three expensive cafés, reading the afternoon papers, exchanging gossip, and acquiring the necessary stock of cynicism for their next picture of leisure-class life.

It was what might have been described as the “court method” of literary achievement. The centre of it was the young prince who held the purse-strings; and the court was a coterie of bookish men of fashion and rich women whose husbands were occupied in the stock-market. They set the tone and dispensed the favors; one who stood in their good graces would be practically immune to criticism, no matter how seedy his work might come to be. Nobody liked to “roast” a man with whom he had played golf at a week-end party; and who could be so impolite as to slight the work of a lady-poetess whom he had taken in to dinner?