“’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 world.  Most of ’em were here long before papa came, and the grandfathers of the girls of my age knew each other, and—­”

“I see,” Bibbs interrupted, gravely.  “Their ancestors fled together from many a stricken field, and Crusaders’ blood flows in their veins.  I always understood the first house was built by an old party of the name of Vertrees who couldn’t get along with Dan’l Boone, and hurried away to these parts because Dan’l wanted him to give back a gun he’d lent him.”

Edith gave a little ejaculation of alarm.  “You mustn’t repeat that story, Bibbs, even if it’s true.  The Vertreeses are the best family, and of course the very oldest here; they were an old family even before Mary Vertrees’s great-great-grandfather came west and founded this settlement.  He came from Lynn, Massachusetts, and they have relatives there yet—­some of the best people in Lynn!”

“No!” exclaimed Bibbs, incredulously.