on't care! Much good it does me!"

Mrs. Jordan after an instant recovered her superiority. "No--it doesn't
lead to much." Her own initiations so clearly did. Still--after all;
and she was not jealous: "There must be a charm."

"In seeing them?" At this the girl suddenly let herself go. "I hate
them. There's that charm!"

Mrs. Jordan gaped again. "The _real_ 'smarts'?"

"Is that what you call Mrs. Bubb? Yes--it comes to me; I've had Mrs.
Bubb. I don't think she has been in herself, but there are things her
maid has brought. Well, my dear!"--and the young person from Cocker's,
recalling these things and summing them up, seemed suddenly to have much
to say. She didn't say it, however; she checked it; she only brought
out: "Her maid, who's horrid--_she_ must have her!" Then she went on
with indifference: "They're _too_ real! They're selfish brutes."

Mrs. Jordan, turning it over, adopted at last the plan of treating it
with a smile. She wished to be liberal. "Well, of course, they do lay
it out."

"They bore me to death," her companion pursued with slightly more
temperance.

But this was going too far. "Ah that's because you've no sympathy!"

The girl gave an ironic laugh, only retorting that nobody could have any
who had to count all day all the words in the dictionary; a contention
Mrs. Jordan quite granted, the more that she shuddered at the notion of
ever failing of the very gift to which she owed the vogue--the rage she
might call it--that had caught her up. Without sympathy--or without
imagination, for it came back again to that--how should she get, for big
dinners, down the middle and toward the far corners at all? It wasn't
the combinations, which were easily managed: the strain was over the
ineffable simplicities, those that the bachelors above all, and Lord Rye
perhaps most of any, threw off--just blew off like cigarette-puffs--such
sketches of. The betrothed of Mr. Mudge at all events accepted the
explanation, which had the effect, as almost any turn of their talk was
now apt to have, of bringing her round to the terrific question of that
gentleman. She was tormented with the desire to get out of Mrs. Jordan,
on this subject, what she was sure was at the back of Mrs. Jordan's head;
and to get it out of her, queerly enough, if only to vent a certain
irritation at it. She knew that what her friend would already have
risked if she hadn't been timid and tortuous was: "Give him up--yes, g