“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 good manners who believed, and acted upon the belief, that he was the superior of most of the members of his own family—­the human race.

“I suppose I could compress myself back into being satisfied with this sort of people and things,” she thought, as she looked round the ballroom from which pose and self-consciousness and rigid conventionality had banished spontaneous gayety.  “I suppose I could even again come to fancying this the only life.  But I certainly don’t care for it now.”

But, although Adelaide was thus using her eyes and her mind—­her own eyes and her own mind—­in observing what was going on around her, she did not disconcert the others, not even Janet, by expressing her thoughts.  Common sense—­absolute common sense—­always sounds incongruous in a conventional atmosphere.  In its milder forms it produces the effect of wit; in stronger doses it