The Buccaneers

by Edith Wharton

The fact was, you could hardly tell a lady now from an actress, or—er—the other kind of woman; and society at Saratoga, now that all the best people were going to Newport, had grown as mixed and confusing as the fashions.

Everything was changed since crinolines had gone out and bustles come in.

Mrs. St. George was instinctively distrustful of the advantages of ladies who had daughters of the age of her own, and Lizzy Elmsworth, the eldest of her neighbour’s family, was just about the age of Virginia St. George, and might by some (those who preferred the brunette to the very blonde type) be thought as handsome.

had it not been for this new Closson danger Mrs. Elmsworth in her present situation would have been negligible; but now that Virginia St. George and Lizzy Elmsworth were “out”

Mrs. St. George began to wonder whether she and her neighbour might not organize some sort of joint defence against new women with daughters.

Mrs. St. George no longer compared her eldest daughter and Lizzy Elmsworth with each other; she began to compare them both with the newcomer, the daughter of the unknown Mrs. Closson.

“Virginia, I don’t want you should go round any more with that strange girl,” Mrs. St. George began.

Mrs. St. George’s only way of guiding her children was to be always crying out to them not to do this or that.

Nan St. George, at sixteen, was at the culminating phase of a passionate admiration for her elder sister. Virginia was all that her junior longed to be:

Conchita Closson

Long before Mrs. St. George and Mrs. Elmsworth had agreed on a valuation of the newcomer, Nan had fallen under her spell.

two young men, two authentic new dancers for the hotel beauties. Mrs. St. George knew all about them. The little olive-faced velvet-eyed fellow, with the impudently curly black hair, was Teddy de Santos-Dios, Mr. Closson’s Brazilian step-son, over on his annual visit to the States; the other, the short heavy-looking young man with a low forehead pressed down by a shock of drab hair, an uncertain mouth under a thick drab moustache, and small eyes, slow, puzzled, not unkindly yet not reliable, was Lord Richard Marable, the impecunious younger son of an English marquess,