as I stood there watching the throng which saluted this queenly woman of the world, in an hour of supreme social triumph, while the notes of the distant orchestra came softly on the air, and the overpowering perfume of banks of flowers and tropical plants—­why was it that I thought of a fair, simple girl, stirred with noble ideals, eager for the intellectual life, tender, sympathetic, courageous?  It was Margaret Debree—­how often I had seen her thus!—­sitting on her little veranda, swinging her chip hat by the string, glowing from some errand in which her heart had played a much more important part than her purse.  I caught the odor of the honeysuckle that climbed on the porch, and I heard the note of the robin that nested there.

“You seem to be in a brown study,” said Carmen, who came up, leaning on the arm of the Earl of Chisholm.

“I’m lost in admiration.  You must make allowance, Miss Eschelle, for a person from the country.”

“Oh, we are all from the country.  That is the beauty of it.  There is Mr. Hollowell, used to drive a peddler’s cart, or something of that sort, up in Maine, talking with Mr. Stott, whose father came in on the towpath of the Erie Canal.  You don’t dance?  The earl has just been giving me a whirl in the ballroom, and I’ve been trying to make him understand about democracy.”

“Yes,” the earl rejoined; “Miss Eschelle has been interpreting to me republican simplicity.”

“And he cannot point out, Mr. Fairchild, why this is not as good as a reception at St. James.  I suppose it’s his politeness.”

“Indeed, it is all very charming.  It must be a great thing to be the architect of your own fortune.”

“Yes; we are all self-made,” Carmen confessed.

“I am, and I get dreadfully tired of it sometimes.  I have to read over the Declaration and look at the map of the Western country at such times.  A body has to have something to hold on to.”

“Why, this seems pretty substantial,” I said, wondering what the girl was driving at.

“Oh, yes; I suppose the world looks solid from a balloon.  I heard one man say to another just now, ‘How long do you suppose Henderson will last?’ Probably we shall all come down by the run together by-and-by.”

“You seem to be on a high plane,” I suggested.

“I guess it’s the influence of the earl.  But I am the most misunderstood of women.  What I really like is simplicity.  Can you have that without the social traditions,” she appealed to the earl, “such as you have in England?”

“I really cannot say,” the earl replied, laughing.  “I fancied there was simplicity in Brandon; perhaps that was traditional.”

“Oh, Brandon!” Carmen cried, “see what Brandon does when it gets a chance.  I assure your lordship that we used to be very simple people in New York.  Come, let us go and tell Mrs. Henderson how delightful it all is.  I’m so sorry for her.”