hold furnishings or apparel, and who deliberately
preferred not to have it. That her own pretty things were no sooner
established than they began to lose their charm for her, never occurred
to Mrs. White: she was a woman of conventional type, perfectly
satisfied to spend her whole life in acquiring things essentially
invaluable, and to use a naturally shrewd and quick intelligence in
copying fashions of all sorts, small and large, as fast as advanced
merchants and magazines presented them to her. She was one of the great
army of women who help to send the sale of an immoral book well up into
the hundreds of thousands; she liked to spend long afternoons with a
box of chocolates and a book unfit for the touch of any woman; a book
that she would review for the benefit of her friends later, with a
shocked wonder that "they dare print such things!" She liked to tell a
man's story, and the other women could not but laugh at her, for she
was undeniably good company, and nobody ever questioned the taste of
anything she ever said or did. She was a famous gossip, for like all
women, she found the private affairs of other people full of
fascination, and, having no legitimate occupation, she was always at
liberty to discuss them.

Yet Mrs. White was not at all an unusual woman, and, like her
associates, she tacitly assumed herself to be the very flower of
American womanhood. She quoted her distinguished relatives on all
occasions, the White family, in all its ramifications, supplied the
correct precedent for all the world; there was no social emergency to
which some cousin or aunt of Mrs. White's had not been more than equal.
Having no children of her own, she still could silence and shame many a
good mother with references to Cousin Ethel Langstroth's "kiddies", or
to Aunt Grace Thurston's wonderful governess.

Personally, Mrs. White vaguely felt that there was something innately
indecent about children anyway, the smaller they were the less
mentionable she found them. The little emergencies, of nose-bleeds and
torn garments and spilled porridge, that were constantly arising in the
neighborhood of children, made her genuinely sick and faint. And she
had so humorous and so assured an air of saying "Disgusting!" or
"Disgraceful!" when the family of some other woman began to present
itself with reasonable promptness, that other women found themselves
laughing and saying "Disgusting!" too.

Mrs. Burgoyne, like Mrs. White, was a bor