Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish New York Society Leader

Originally published in 1902, contains lots of info and illustrations seldom seen in the last 110 years.

Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, as the acknowledged leader of the spectacular element of New York society, occupies a uniquely conspicuous position. The little realm over which she rules is but a small part of the great social world; but it is set upon a hill. She and her subjects, engaged apparently in a continuous performance, are ever in the public eye. Their comings and goings, their routes and fetes, their loves and their aversions, their marriages and their divorces, the clothes they wear, the wines they drink, the pranks they play, the jests they utter, all are chronicled in the newspapers.

Tall, dark and florid, with a figure calculated to display to advantage the sumptuous adornment with which she provides it, Mrs. is distinguee rather than beautiful. Mrs. Fish's jewels are among the handsomest in New York. She does not affect a tiara, but wears in her hair a magnificent diamond spray. About her neck circles a collar of pearls three inches deep. Suspended from it in front, by a thread of diamonds four inches long, is a diamond cluster that, viewed across the horseshoe at the Metropolitan Opera House, looks like an enormous single stone. Extending diagonally down her corsage she wears a row of buttons of diamonds set around sapphires, each sapphire as large as one's finger nail. A festoon of diamonds from the left shoulder to the front of the corsage completes the display.

Whatever difference of opinion may exist on this score, there is no question concerning Mrs. Fish's cleverness. Her friends and her foes agree that she is fertile in conception and adroit in execution. She is quick-witted and far-sighted, and though her tongue may be sharp sometimes to cruelty, her observations invariably possess a keenness and a point that command attention. Time and again Mrs. Fish has enacted the role of the society Moses and has led the children of fashion out of the dull monotony of convention into the land of the bizarre. Novelty is Mrs. Fish's watchword. It was she that first ventured to give a barn dance at Newport at which the guests appeared in the costumes of French peasants of a century or two ago, and indulged in such bucolic sports as hunting eggs in the hay lofts and milking the cows in the stalls. It was Mrs. Fish, too, that introduced the "reversible" dance, where all clothes were worn hind side before and the back of each head was covered with a mask. At one of her dances she introduced live favors for one figure of the cotillion. It is said that many of the little beasts escaped from their cages and were forgotten or purposely left behind by the guests. The result was that for two days following the dance they poked them¬selves under Mrs. Fish's feet or peered at her from behind curtains