Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1902-11-22
SCENE OF GRANDEUR
At Opening of New York
Horse Show.
NOTHING ELSE LIKE IT
WOMEN IN GORGEOUS RAIMENT
IN EVIDENCE.
They and the Men ogle and Leer at
Each Other in Illbred
Fashion.
NOTHING ELSE LIKE IT
pecial Correspondence Of The Evening Star.


NEW YORK, November 81, 1902.
The town has the horse show this week
| and the horse show has the town. There
are reasons. of course. why it is called the
horse show. Many horses are shown
horses beautiful and stately, natty and
alert cute and cunnin', all Of them equine
aristocrats," to employ that sadly tagged
out phrase as applied to all horse shows.
But the affair might with equal appropriate
ness be called the costume exposition, the
jewelers. exhibition, the tailors' fair or any
old thing denominating essentially human
pictorial effects. Some horsy people go to
the horse show to see the horses These
are In the ratio of about one In a thousand
The other 900 go to the horse show to daz-
zle and be dazzled. There are two annual
events in New York beyond all others that
are calculated to cause persons In only
moderate circumstances to feel like stow
ing themselves away in the shadowy corners
One of them Is the first night at the opera
and the other is the first day and night at
the horse show Every New York opera
night, of course, Is a splendid affair, and
every day at the horse show, while 1t lasts,
is an exhibition of sumptuosity a-riotlng;
but the initials of these two institutions are
affairs that arouse Klondike aspirations in
the bosoms Of such only comfortably
fixed individuals as drift within the glare
of SO much magnificence.
Say" remarked q quiet-looking little
man, apparently a clerk or a business man
in a small way, who emerged from the
horse show on the first night, dye know
how / feel? 1 feel like a field mouse that's
been stepped upon by procession of ele-
plants"
Focus Of Tradespeople's Eyes.
The horse show in New York down to
the minute the doors are opened is the
ne
the milliner, the modesto the tailor, the
jeweer, the furrier and all the rest of the
students of and the purveyors to human
adornment, feminine and masculine. 1t is
wealth, both inherited and vulgarly &C
quired, on parade The wine agents wife
endeavors to outvie in splendor the matron
with the knickerbocker name. Often
enough, too she succeeds. The actress
sets her jewels alongside those of the Wis
iting countess, and if she wins takes the
triumph with foolish glee, or If she loses
accepts the defeat with childish gloom. The
chorus girl of the hour preens herself in
the box next to that of the wife of the Wall
street king and both survey each other with
cheerful dsdain. 1t is all Kaleidoscope
cosmopolntanism. The millionaire of
the great merchant with no antecedents
arrays his women folks against the femi-
nine contingent of the millionaire whose
ancestors names are written in colonial
history, and the silent battle of toggery
and effect is a weird thing to witness.
The horses enter the ring and the horses
leave the ring, but they are merely the
medium through which this extraordinary
annual assemblage gets together, and at
times they are all but disregarded. The
quadrupedS may strut their pretuest, but
the bipeds are too busily engaged in strut
ting themselves to pay more than passing
attention to them. Manners, the ordinary
amenities Of human contact in crowds, are
all but forgotten by all hands at the horse
show. How they stare at each other! How
how 1y1cr oil n ooI nr n foh ha
design of a collarette, to make mental
picture of applique! If your wife is
very handsome and very de rigeur-Wsll,
the men at the horse show going to
adjust their monocles and survey her at
extremely close range, and you are not to
make any demonstration over their au-
dacty. And the women at the horse show
study the attitudinizing men with equal
frankness
Staring is the Mode.
The idea at the horse show, followed by
all hands, is this: How are you going to
see, unless you look? And so they stare
and gaze and-well. the word Is absolutely
inevitable in this connection-they rubber
neck" with all their might and there is
no offense. Horse show manners are man
ners set apart. The girl who would COM
plain to her brother or her father, the wife
who would complain to her husband, If in
any other place she were subjected to the
twenty masculine monocles and lorgnettes,
IS demure, unseeing or merely smiling I'M
der such an assault al the horse show. She
would, in truth, be grievously disappointed
In her soul were she not the recipient of
such a concentration of ill-bred stares.
travelled Englishman, looking on at the
horse show the other night, remarked to
the writer that he would not have believed
that there were such women, or such raj
ment adjoining them in the world. He said
that the picture even made the wonderful
assemblage Of superbly-costumed women
at the Longchamps race course on a Sun
day afternoon look comparatively dowdy.
And he was man who knew.
This year, curiously enough, almost the
entire display has been made by women
who are, in the eyes of the women exalted
in the social world, simply "nobodies"
They are the women of socially unrecog-
nized millionaires, notably actresses, west
ern women Of social rank in their own COM
munities but of no social standing here
and so on. The genuine society women Of
New York have queer, and let 1t be said
a rather trivial method of trying to take
the wind out of the sails of their sisters of