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Mrs. Holland, and had never forgotten the slight.) He had been an adorable and lanky fellow whom Elizabeth used to enjoy making blush by asking him, for instance, to explain the difference between décolletage and décolleté . It was comical what lengths Elizabeth seemed to go to these days to prove what a proper little miss she was. Penelope never worried so much over anything, especially not whether she was perceived as a lady.
    Which was all well and good, since Penelope was something less than a lady, at least from the point of view of members of the old Dutch families like Elizabeth’s mother, who nonetheless had been enjoying the lavishness of the Hayeses’ ballroom all evening. A ballroom, Penelope couldn’t help but thinking, far more vast and sparkling than the Holland ballroom. The Hollands lived in an old and really rather plain sort of mansion in Gramercy Park with a staid brown face and the rooms all in neat rows. And that wasn’t even a fashionable part of town anymore.
    Penelope might have felt bad for Liz that she still lived in such a backwater while the Hayes family had moved on to Fifth Avenue uptown, with its strip of grand new residences, except that she knew very well Liz’s mother was always talking about the Hayeses and how they were a made-up family. Which was a rather harsh way of looking at it. It was true that the Hayes fortune had begun when Penelope’s grandfather, Ogden Hazmat Jr., gave up his modest tailoring business in Maryland and began selling cotton blankets to the Union army for the price of wool. But ever since Granddad had moved to New York, changed his name, and bought a Washington Square town house from a bankrupt branch of the Rhinelander family, the Hayes clan had been entrenched in New York society.
    Now they’d left Washington Square behind forever, and resituated themselves in the only private home in New York with three elevator banks and a basement swimming pool. They had arrived, and they had the mansion to prove it. Or a palazzo , as her mother consistently and irritatingly referred to it.
    “Good work tonight, Buck,” Penelope said, her full lips breaking into a smile of enormous pride. In parlor chatter, Penelope’s beauty was occasionally derided as being all lips, but the jabbering hens who said so were certainly in error: Penelope’s lips were no more striking than her eyes, whichwere wide and blue and capable of welling with innocence or scorn in equal measure.
    “Only for you,” he replied in his nasally faux-British accent. Isaac had something of a case of Anglomania, and it had lately spread to his diction.
    Since Isaac was only half-acknowledged by the Buck clan as one of their own, he was obliged to work for a living, and had made himself indispensable to hostesses like Mrs. Hayes. He always knew where to get the freshest flowers, and where to find handsome young men who were willing to dance and fun to dance with, even if they weren’t exactly marriageable. He knew how to shriek at the cooks so that the meats would come out just done enough. Isaac’s shriek was not pretty, but his parties always were.
    “I have to say,” Isaac went on drolly, “everyone does look their best this evening. It wasn’t all in vain. I mean, the jewels alone. You could buy Manhattan with those jewels.”
    “Yes,” Penelope agreed. “Though it never fails to shock me how people can dump a trainload of baubles over some piece of hide.”
    “Oh, that’s just Agnes you’re talking about, and she barely has any baubles. Anyway, I think she’s supposed to be Annie Oakley, and I believe if you queried her dressmaker, he would say the getup was suede .”
    “Hah. You know very well that Agnes doesn’t have adressmaker, Buckie.” Penelope smirked. “And Amos Vreewold as a matador? Please.” She turned to her friend, one dark eyebrow high.
    “Now, now. It’s not every man who can look dignified in tights.”
    “Oh, look—there’s Teddy Cutting!” Penelope