ecided, as she
glanced from one to another, no more pleasure in it. There was talk.
Moore chatted so exuberantly, his little hands upon his fattish knees,
that he seemed to squeeze sociability out of himself in a rapture of
generous willingness to share all he had. He asked the colonel how he
liked Addington, and was not abashed at being reminded that the colonel
had known Addington for a good many years.

"Still it's changed," said Moore, regarding him almost archly.
"Addington isn't the place it was even a year ago."

"I hope we've learned something," said Miss Amabel earnestly and yet
prettily too.

"My theory of Addington," said Choate easily, "is that we all wish we
were back in the Addington of a hundred years ago."

"You'd want to be in the dominant class," said Moore. There was
something like the trammels of an unwilling respect over his manner to
Choate; yet still he managed to be rallying. "When the old merchants
were coming home with china and bales of silk and Paris shoes for madam.
And think of it," said he, raising his sparse eyebrows and looking like
a marionette moulded to express something and saying it with painful
clumsiness, almost grotesquerie, "the ships are bringing human products
now. They're bringing us citizens, bone and sinew of the republic, and
we cry back to china and bales of silk."

"I didn't answer you, Moore," said Choate, turning to him and speaking,
Lydia thought, with the slightest arrogance. "I should have wanted to
belong to the governing class--of course."

"Now!" said Miss Amabel. She spoke gently, and she was, they saw, pained
at the turn the talk had taken. "Alston, why should you say that?"

"Because I mean it," said Alston. His quietude seemed to carry a private
message to Moore, but he turned to her, as he spoke and smiled as if to
ask her not to interpret him harshly. "Of course I should have wanted to
be in the dominant class. So does everybody, really."

"No, my dear," said Miss Amabel.

"No," agreed Choate, "you don't. The others like you didn't. I won't
embarrass you by naming them. You want to sit submerged, you others, and
be choked by slime, if you must be, and have the holy city built up on
your shoulders. But the rest of us don't. Moore here doesn't, do you,
Weedie?"

Weedon gave a quick embarrassed laugh.

"You're so droll," said he.

"No," said Choate quietly, "I'm not being droll. Of course I want to
belong to the dominant class. So does the man t