Peter by E.F. Benson

During the next month the foam and froth which spouted from the weir of London, into which Mrs. Wardour, of her own design and desire, had been so expensively plunged, began to be less tumultuous as she floated away from the occasion of her first bewildering dive. Lady Thirlmere, that admirable godmother, had chucked her into it, holding her breath and shutting her eyes, and now Mrs. Wardour was getting her head above water and beginning to paddle on her own account. The sponsor had provided the richness of total immersion, and Lucy Wardour was certainly swimming. As she came up to the surface, she found herself surrounded by iridescent bubbles; she was bobbing along in a mill-race of desirable acquaintances.

She had made no friends -- there was no time for leisurely processes of this sort; but when she had decided that she wanted to spend her months and her money in the pursuit of some such indefinite goal as now loomed promisingly in front of her, she had not expected to make friends. She had not "gone for" friends; she had gone for something that attracted the attention of the accomplished gentlemen who wrote those small and exquisite paragraphs in the daily papers. Inscrutably enough, that happened to be her ambition; what she wanted was to see (though she knew it already) that "Mrs. Wardour was among those who brought a party to the first night of _The Bugaboo_. ". "Mrs. Wardour gave a dinner at Wardour House last night, followed by a small dance. " . "Mrs. Wardour was in the Park, chatting to her friends, and wearing a green toque and her famous pearls. ". Among her secretary's duties was that of pasting these juicy morsels, supplied by a press-agency, into a red morocco scrapbook.