A Tragedy of the Chelsea Club Ball
Regularly once a year, somewhere about the first week in February, Mrs. Pendercoet was wont to apply to her friends and acquaintances for a character. Not the sort of character which guarantees an applicant for a post of responsibility to be clean and honest and a lifelong abstainer, but a borrowed masquerade identity under which the wearer could momentarily lay aside the matronly state of Pendercoet, solemnly assumed many years ago at St. George’s, Hanover Square, and become, if she so willed it, a nautch girl or the Second Mrs. Tanqueray.
“Do suggest some costume for me to go to the Arts’ Club Ball in,” she would entreat every one; “not Marie Stuart or Diane de Poitiers. Something new and original.”