YOU," Edith babbled. "I only
meant I thought she was the kind of girl who was so simply crazy to
marry somebody she'd have married anybody that asked her."

"Yes, yes," said Bibbs, "it's all straight." And, perceiving that
his sister's expression was that of a person whose adroitness has set
matters perfectly to rights, he chuckled silently.

"Roscoe's perfectly lovely to her," she continued, a moment later. "Too
lovely! If he'd wake up a little and lay down the law, some day, like a
MAN, I guess she'd respect him more and learn to behave herself!"

"'Behave'?"

"Oh, well, I mean she's so insincere," said Edith, characteristically
evasive when it came to stating the very point to which she had led, and
in this not unique of her sex.

Bibbs contented himself with a non-committal gesture. "Business
is crawling up the old streets," he said, his long, tremulous hand
indicating a vasty structure in course of erection. "The boarding-houses
come first and then the--"

"That isn't for shops," she informed him. "That's a new investment of
papa's--the 'Sheridan Apartments.'"

"Well, well," he murmured. "I supposed 'Sheridan' was almost well enough
known here already."

"Oh, we're well enough known ABOUT!" she said, impatiently. "I guess
there isn't a man, woman, child, or nigger baby in town that doesn't
know who we are. But we aren't in with the right people."

"No!" he exclaimed. "Who's all that?"

"Who's all what?"

"The 'right people.'"

"You know what I mean: the best people, the old families--the people
that have the real social position in this town and that know they've
got it."

Bibbs indulged in his silent chuckle again; he seemed greatly amused. "I
thought that the people who actually had the real what-you-may-call-it
didn't know it," he said. "I've always understood that it was very
unsatisfactory, because if you thought about it you didn't have it, and
if you had it you didn't know it."

"That's just bosh," she retorted. "They know it in this town, all right!
I found out a lot of things, long before we began to think of building
out in this direction. The right people in this town aren't always the
society-column ones, and they mix around with outsiders, and they don't
all belong to any one club--they're taken in all sorts into all their
clubs--but they're a clan, just the same; and they have the clan feeling
and they're just as much We, Us and Company as any crowd you read about
anywhere in the w