iduality."

"I see," said Adelaide, as if struck by a new idea. "You'd have the
contrasts, differences among flowers, not merely between flower and weed.
You'd abolish the weeds."

"Root and stalk," answered Dory, admiring her way of putting it. "My
objection to these aristocratic ideals is that they are so vulgar--and so
dishonest. Is that prejudice?"

"No--oh, no!" replied Del sincerely. "Now, it seems to me, I don't care
to go with Janet."

"Not to oblige me--very particularly? I want you to go. I want you to
see for yourself, Del."

She laughed. "Then I'll go--but only because you ask it."

* * * * *

That was indeed an elegant company at Besancon--elegant in dress, elegant
in graceful carelessness of manners, elegant in graceful sinuosities of
cleverly turned phrases. But after the passing of the first and second
days' sensations, Hiram and Ellen Ranger's daughter began to have
somewhat the same feeling she remembered having as a little girl, when
she went to both the afternoon and the evening performances of the
circus. These people, going through always the same tricks in the same
old narrow ring of class ideas, lost much of their charm after a few
repetitions of their undoubtedly clever and attractive performance; she
even began to see how they would become drearily monotonous. "No wonder
they look bored," she thought. "They are." What enormous importance they
attached to trifles! What ludicrous tenacity in exploded delusions! And
what self-complacent claiming of remote, powerful ancestors who had
founded their families, when those ancestors would have disclaimed them
as puny nonentities. Their ideas were wholly provided for them, precisely
as were their clothes and every artistic thing that gave them
"background." They would have made as absurd a failure of trying to
evolve the one as the other. Yet they posed--and were widely accepted--as
the superiors of those who made their clothes and furniture and of those
who made their ideas. And she had thought Dory partly insincere, partly
prejudiced when he had laughed at them. Why, he had only shown the
plainest kind of American good sense. As for snobbishness, was not the
silly-child American brand of it less ridiculous than this unblushing and
unconcealed self-reverence, without any physical, mental or material
justification whatsoever? They hadn't good manners even, because--as Dory
had once said--no one could have really goo