Margaret was to stay some time with two maiden ladies, old friends of her mother, the Misses Arbuser.  The Arbusers were people of consequence in their day, with a certain social prestige; in fact, the excellent ladies were two generations removed from successful mercantile life, which in the remote prospective took on an old-family solidity.  Nowhere else in the city could Margaret have come closer in contact with a certain phase of New York life in which women are the chief actors—­a phase which may be a transition, and may be only a craze.  It is not so much a condescension of society to literature as it is a discovery that literature and art, in the persons of those who produce both, may be sources of amusement, or perhaps, to be just, of the enlargement of the horizon and the improvement of the mind.  The society mind was never before so hospitable to new ideas and new sensations.  Charities, boards of managers, missions, hospitals, news-rooms, and lodging-houses for the illiterate and the homeless—­these are not sufficient, even with balls, dancing classes, and teas, for the superfluous energies of this restless, improving generation; there must be also radical clubs, reading classes, study classes, ethical, historical, scientific, literary lectures, the reading of papers by ladies of distinction and gentlemen of special attainments—­an unremitting pursuit of culture and information.  Curiosity is awake.  The extreme of social refinement and a mild Bohemianism almost touch.  It passes beyond the affectation of knowing persons who write books and write for the press, artists in paint and artists in music.  “You cannot be sure in the most exclusive circle”—­it was Carmen Eschelle who said this—­“that you will not meet an author or even a journalist.”  Not all the women, however, adore letters or affect enthusiasm at drawing-room lectures; there are some bright and cynical ones who do not, who write papers themselves, and have an air of being behind the scenes.

Margaret had thought that she was fully occupied in the country, with her teaching, her reading, her literature and historical clubs, but she had never known before what it was to be busy and not have time for anything, always in pursuit of some new thing, and getting a fragment here and there; life was a good deal like reading the dictionary and remembering none of the words.  And it was all so cosmopolitan and all-embracingly sympathetic.  One day it was a paper by a Servian countess on the social life of the Servians, absorbingly interesting both in itself and because it was a countess who read it; and this was followed by the singing of an Icelandic tenor and a Swedish soprano, and a recital on the violin by a slight, red-haired, middle-aged woman from London.  All the talents seem to be afloat and at the service of the strenuous ones who are cultivating themselves.