of youth was in her smile, and a
becoming school-girl shyness in her fleeting blushes. In the floral
language of American society, she was "not a bud"; she was only that
small, hard, green thing out of which the bud is to unfold itself, but
which does not lack a beauty of promise specially its own. If any
criticism could be passed upon her, it was that which her father
made--that there was danger of the promise being anticipated by a rather
premature fulfilment, and the flower that needed time forced into a
hurried, hot-house bloom.

"What! And leave my friends!" she exclaimed, when Derek, with some
hesitation, had asked her how she would like the journey.

"They would keep."

"That's just what they wouldn't do. When I came back I should find them
in all sorts of new combinations, out of which I should be dropped.
You've got to be on the spot to keep in your set, otherwise you're
lost."

"Why should you be in a set? Why shouldn't you be independent?"

"That just shows how much you understand, father," she said, pityingly.
"A girl who isn't in a set is as much an outsider as a Hindoo who isn't
in a caste. I must know people; and I must know the right people; and I
must know no one but the right people. It's perfectly simple."

"Oh, perfectly. I can't help wondering, though, how you recognize the
right people when you see them."

"By instinct. You couldn't make a mistake about that, any more than one
pigeon could make a mistake about another, or take it for a crow."

"And is young Wappinger one of the right people?"

It was with an effort that Derek made up his mind to broach this
subject, but Dorothea's self-possession was not disturbed.

"Certainly," she replied, briefly, with perhaps a slight accentuation of
her maiden dignity.

"I'm rather surprised at that."

"Yes; you should be," she conceded; "but I couldn't make you understand
it, any more than you could make me understand banking."

"I'm not convinced of the impossibility of either," he objected,
knocking the top off an egg. "Suppose you were to try."

Dorothea shook her head.

"It wouldn't be of any use. The fact is, I really don't understand it
myself. What's more, I don't suppose anybody else does. Carli Wappinger
belongs to the right people because the right people say he does; and
there is no more to be said about it."

"I should think that Mrs. Wappinger might be a--drawback."

"Not if the right people don't think so; and they don't. T