Rags Martin-Jones

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

• The arrivalShe comes off the Majestic last, behind two French maids carrying small purple dogs, a squad of porters blind and invisible under bunches of fresh flowers, a third maid leading a sad-eyed orphan child of a French flavour, and the second officer pulling three reluctant wolfhounds.
• The monocleShe wears a preposterous monocle in an eye of clear childish blue, and every few steps her long lashes tilt it out, so she laughs a bored, happy laugh and replaces it in the other eye. Her hair is cut to what the story calls convict's length. She weighs one hundred and five pounds.
• Seventy-five million dollarsThe fortune came to her on her tenth birthday. Six lawyers and bankers of the Martin-Jones trust wait in the hall of her suite at the Ritz from half past one, through her bath, her nap, a masseuse, a manicure and a Parisian hairdresser, and are eventually told she is much too weary from her trip to talk to them.
• The man on the dockJohn M. Chestnut has been hopelessly in love with her for five years and is at the pier to meet her. When he raises his voice about it in front of a crowd she takes a brisk step forward, and he retreats, finds nothing behind him, and goes off the thirty-foot dock into the Hudson River. She leans over the pier, makes a megaphone of her hands, and calls down that she will be in at half past four.
• The bazaarsHer account of what life offers her: a series of glistening bazaars, a merchant in front of each one rubbing his hands and calling it the best bazaar in the world, and her own purse full of beauty and money and youth. Whatever else they are out of, they always give her love before she goes, and for nothing. That, she says, is the one revenge she has.
• Dressing to meet a princeTold the Prince of Wales will be in a New York night club that evening, she calls all three maids at once and issues orders: the gold dress and the slippers with the real gold heels, all the pearls and the egg-diamond, the stockings with the sapphire clocks, another bath half full of almond cream, Tiffany's before it closes for anything at all bearing the arms of the house of Windsor, and four dozen orchids so she can choose four.
• In the spotlightThe night-club comedian picks her out with a baby spotlight and makes her the joke of the evening. She composes her face at the first shock of the light and smiles a smile with a vast impersonality in it, as though she is amused at somebody infinitely far away, and sits there glittering until the comedian begins to feel more alone than he has ever felt before. He signals for the light to be switched out.