He rose abruptly, and with a groaning burst of impatience that had a tinge of anger:  “Oh, for God’s sake, Caroline, why don’t you throw overboard all this fashionable business, this striving to keep an empty position, and be—­and be—­”

“And be what?” put in Mrs. De Peyster with glittering eye.

“And be just yourself!” he cried defiantly, squarely facing her.  “There, at last I’ve said it!  And I’m going to say the rest of it.  This Mrs. De Peyster that heads everything isn’t at all the simple, natural gracious Carrie De Peyster that John De Peyster and I made love to!  You’re not the real Mrs. De Peyster; you only think you are.  This Mrs. De Peyster the world knows is something that’s been built by and out of the obligation which you accepted to maintain the De Peyster dignity.  She’s only a surface, a shell, a mask!  If your mother hadn’t died, and then your mother-in-law, and thrown upon you this whole infernal family business and this infernal social leadership, why, you’d have been an entirely different person—­”

“Judge Harvey!”

“You’d then have been the real Mrs. De Peyster!” he rushed hotly on.  “Oh, all this show, this struggle for place, this keeping up a front, I know it’s only a part of the universal comedy of our pretending to be what we’re not,—­every one of us is doing the same, in a big way, or a little way,—­but it makes me sick!  For God’s sake, Caroline, chuck it—­chuck it all and be just the fine human woman that there is in you!”

She was trembling with suppressed wrath.  Never before—­not to her face, at least—­had such criticism been directed at her.

“And ultimately be Mrs. Harvey—­no, thank you!” she replied, in a choking, caustic voice.  “But while you are at it, have you any further suggestions for my conduct?”

“Yes,” said he determinedly.  “You have been spending too much money, and spending it on utterly worthless purposes.  This social duel—­that’s just what it is—­between you and Mrs. Allistair, besides being nonsense, will be absolutely ruinous if you keep it up.  Mrs. Allistair is as unprincipled in a social way as her husband has been in a business way; her ambition will hesitate to use no means, you know that—­and, don’t forget this, she can spend fifty dollars to your one!”

“I believe,” with blazing hauteur, yet still controlled, “that I possess something superior to Mrs. Allistair’s dollars.”

“Yes,” groaned the Judge, “your confounded old-family business!”

“And speaking of money,” continued Mrs. De Peyster in her cuttingest, most withering, most annihilatory grand manner, “perhaps I should have spent my money worthily, like Judge Harvey, upon a gift of Thomas Jefferson letters to the American Historical Society.”