But there is beauty in her extraordinary gallery, as well as caricature. The patterns on her flappers’ gowns are like laces and hangings by Beardsley; a Pomeranian lying on a rug, becomes a patch of elegant scrollery, like a detail in a Japanese print. There is no trace at all, in her drawings, of the hackneyed conventions of illustration: everything in them is presented through the medium of an original feeling for form. Even her profiteering millionaires become designs made up of deft and satisfying curves. Her sketches are creations not only of a clever and sophisticated intelligence, but of a true artist.
[Illustration: _Photograph by Malcolm Arbuthnot_
In depicting fashionable society Miss Fish is perhaps at her best, for the reason that the spectacle which seems to interest her most is that pageant of “smart” types that race, as if by magic, to her drawing-board, from every haunt of social life--from opera boxes, ballrooms, race-meets, cabarets, smart supper parties, dinners of state, musicales, and the thousand and one happy backgrounds against which the contemporary _beau monde_ is wont to pose and posture.
In the pages of this book the reader will meet only with Miss Fish’s social creations: the double-decked dowagers, the amateur vampires, the horsey horsemen, the diabolically clever little débutantes, the tango addicts, the incurable bridge-players, the worn-out week-end hostesses, and the myriad types of human beings that seem perpetually to haunt the portals of our most exalted society.
For six years, Miss Fish’s sketches have appeared, in America, only in _Vanity Fair_. For the past two years the British public has only seen her work in _Vogue_ (the British edition), and in _The Patrician_,--the English edition of _Vanity Fair_. All the drawings in this book appear here with the permission of Condé Nast, the publisher of _Vogue_, _Vanity Fair_, and _The Patrician_.
_In Which the Scenes and the Principal Characters Are Revealed_
The Opening of the Social Season How the Members of the Beau Monde will Spend what is Left of their War-time Incomes 2
The Opera, in Full Blast Showing that Things are Sounding Much as Usual at the Opera this Year 4
Keeping on with the Dance You Will Certainly be Considered a Social Pariah if you don’t Dance the Night Out 6