world adore, that which would buy
servility, flattery, awe--just so soon did she begin to be an
upper-class lady.

She had acquired a superficial knowledge of business--enough to enable
her to understand what the various items in the long, long schedule of
her holdings meant. Symbols of her importance, of her power. She had
studied the "great ladies" she had met in her travels and visitings.
She had been impressed by the charm of the artistic, carefully
cultivated air of simplicity and equality affected by the greatest of
these great ladies as those born to wealth and position. To be gentle
and natural, to be gracious--that was the "proper thing." So, she now
adopted a manner that was if anything too kindly. Her pose, her mask,
behind which she was concealing her swollen and still swelling pride
and sense of superiority, as yet fitted badly. She "overacted," as
youth is apt to do. She would have given a shrewd observer--one not
dazzled by her wealth beyond the power of clear sight--the impression
that she was pitying the rest of mankind, much as we all pity and
forbear with a hopeless cripple.

But the average observer would simply have said: "What a sweet,
natural girl, so unspoiled by her wealth!"--just as the hopeless
cripple says, "What a polite person," as he gets the benefit of
effusive good manners that would, if he were shrewd, painfully remind
him that he was an unfortunate creature.

Of all the weeds that infest the human garden snobbishness, the
commonest, is the most prolific, and it is a mighty cross breeder,
too--modifying every flower in the garden, changing colors from rich to
glaring, changing odors from perfumes to sickening-sweet or to
stenches. The dead hands of Martin Hastings scattered showers of
shining gold upon his daughter's garden; and from these seeds was
springing a heavy crop of that most prolific of weeds.

She was beginning to resent Charlton's manner--bluff, unceremonious,
candid, at times rude. He treated women exactly as he treated men, and
he treated all men as intimates, free and easy fellow travelers afoot
upon a dusty, vulgar highway. She had found charm in that manner, so
natural to the man of no pretense, of splendid physical proportions, of
the health of a fine tree. She was beginning to get into the state of
mind at which practically all very rich people in a civilized society
sooner or later arrive--a state of mind that makes it impossible for
any to live with