“Why didn’t you bring Jenny along?” inquired Mrs. Ranger, when they were in the “front parlor,” the two older women seated, Adelaide moving restlessly about.

“Janet and Ross haven’t come yet,” answered Mrs. Whitney.  “They’ll be on next week, but only for a little while.  They both like it better in the East.  All their friends are there and there’s so much more to do.”  Mrs. Whitney sighed; before her rose the fascination of all there was to “do” in the East—­the pleasures she was denying herself.

“I don’t see why you don’t live in New York,” said Mrs. Ranger.  “You’re always talking about it.”

“Oh, I can’t leave Charles!” was Mrs. Whitney’s answer.  “Or, rather he’d not hear of my doing it.  But I think he’ll let us take an apartment at Sherry’s next winter—­for the season, just—­unless Janet and I go abroad.”

Mrs. Ranger had not been listening.  She now started up.  “If you’ll excuse me, Mattie, I must see what that cook’s about.  I’m afraid to let her out of my sight for five minutes for fear she’ll up and leave.”

“What a time your poor mother has!” said Mrs. Whitney, when she and Adelaide were alone.

Del had recovered from her attack of what she had been denouncing to herself as snobbishness.  For all the gingham wrapper and spectacles anchored in the hair and general air of hard work and no “culture,” she was thinking, as she looked at Mrs. Whitney’s artificiality and listened to those affected accents, that she was glad her mother was Ellen Ranger and not Matilda Whitney.  “But mother doesn’t believe she has a hard time,” she answered, “and everything depends on what one believes oneself; don’t you think so?  I often envy her.  She’s always busy and interested.  And she’s so useful, such a happiness-maker.”

“I often feel that way, too,” responded Mrs. Whitney, in her most profusely ornate “grande dame” manner.  “I get so bored with leading an artificial life.  I often wish fate had been more kind to me.  I was reading, the other day, that the Queen of England said she had the tastes of a dairy maid.  Wasn’t that charming?  Many of us whom fate has condemned to the routine of high station feel the same way.”

It was by such deliverances that Mrs. Whitney posed, not without success, as an intellectual woman who despised the frivolities of a fashionable existence—­this in face of the obvious fact that she led a fashionable existence, or, rather, it led her, from the moment her masseuse awakened her in the morning until her maid undressed her at night.  But, although Adelaide was far too young, too inexperienced to know that judgment must always be formed from actions, never from words, she was not, in this instance, deceived.  “It takes more courage than most of us have,” said she, “to do what we’d like instead of what vanity suggests.”