"Oh, a mile or more. On some side street where the land is cheap and the
rent low. What do we care for that, Selma mia?"

CHAPTER II.

Shortly before Selma Littleton took up her abode in New York, Miss
Florence, or, as she was familiarly known, Miss Flossy Price, was an
inhabitant of a New Jersey city. Her father was a second cousin of
Morton Price, whose family at that time was socially conspicuous in
fashionable New York society. Not aggressively conspicuous, as ultra
fashionable people are to-day, by dint of frequent newspaper
advertisement, but in consequence of elegant, conservative
respectability, fortified by and cushioned on a huge income. In the
early seventies to know the Morton Prices was a social passport, and by
no means every one socially ambitious knew them. Morton Price's
great-grandfather had been a peddler, his grandfather a tea merchant,
his father a tea merchant and bank organizer, and he himself did nothing
mercantile, but was a director in diverse institutions, representing
trusts or philantrophy, and was regarded by many, including himself, as
the embodiment of ornamental and admirable citizenship. He could talk by
the hour on the degeneracy of state and city politics and the evil deeds
of Congress, and was, generally speaking, a conservative, fastidious,
well-dressed, well-fed man, who had a winning way with women and a happy
faculty of looking wise and saying nothing rash in the presence of men.
Some of the younger generation were apt, with the lack of reverence
belonging to youth, to speak of him covertly as "a stuffed club," but no
echo of this epithet had ever reached the ear of his cousin, David
Price, in New Jersey. For him, as for most of the world within a radius
of two hundred miles, he was above criticism and a monument of social
power.

David Price, Miss Flossy's father, was the president of a small and
unprogressive but eminently solid bank. Respectable routine was his
motto, and he lived up to it, and, as a consequence, no more sound
institution of the kind existed in his neighborhood. He and his
directors were slow to adopt innovations of any kind; they put stumbling
blocks in the path of business convenience whenever they could; in
short, David Price in his humble way was a righteous, narrow, hide-bound
retarder of progress and worshipper of established local custom.
Therefore it was a constant source of surprise and worry to him that he
should have a progressive daugh