“But suppose that does not interest me?”

“Pardon me, Mrs. Henderson, that is because you are used to the conventional, the selected.  Nature is always interesting.”

“I do not find it so.”

“No?  Nature has been covered up; it has been idealized.  Look yonder,” and Mr. Bass pointed across the lawn.  “See that young woman upon whom the sunlight falls standing waiting her turn.  See the quivering of the eyelids, the heaving of the chest, the opening lips; note the curve of her waist from the shoulder, and the line rounding into the fall of the folds of the Austrian cashmere.  I try to saturate myself with that form, to impress myself with her every attitude and gesture, her color, her movement, and then I shall imagine the form under the influence of passion.  Every detail will tell.  I do not find unimportant the tie of her shoe.  The picture will be life.”

“But suppose, Mr. Bass, when you come to speak with her, you find that she has no ideas, and talks slang.”

“All the better.  It shows what we are, what our society is.  And besides, Mrs. Henderson, nearly everybody has the capacity of being wicked; that is to say, of expressing emotion.”

“You take a gloomy view, Mr. Bass.”

“I take no view, Mrs. Henderson.  My ambition is to record.  It will not help matters by pretending that people are better than they are.”

“Well, Mr. Bass, you may be quite right, but I am not going to let you spoil my enjoyment of this lovely scene,” said Margaret, moving away.  Mr. Bass watched her until she disappeared, and then entered in his notebook a phrase for future use, “The prosperous propriety of a pretty plutocrat.”  He was gathering materials for his forthcoming book, “The Last Sigh of the Prude.”

The whole world knows how delightful Lenox is.  It even has a club where the men can take refuge from the exactions of society, as in the city.  The town is old enough to have “histories”; there is a romance attached to nearly every estate, a tragedy of beauty, and money, and disappointment; great writers have lived here, families whose names were connected with our early politics and diplomacy; there is a tradition of a society of wit and letters, of women whose charms were enhanced by a spice of adventure, of men whose social brilliancy ended in misanthropy.  All this gave a background of distinction to the present gayety, luxury, and adaptation of the unsurpassed loveliness of nature to the refined fashion of the age.

Here, if anywhere, one could be above worry, above the passion of envy; for did not every new “improvement” and every new refinement in living add to the importance of every member of this favored community?  For Margaret it was all a pageant of beauty.  The Misses Arbuser talked about the quality of the air, the variety of the scenery, the exhilaration of the drives, the freedom from noise and dust, the country quiet.  There were the morning calls, the intellectual life of the reading clubs, the tennis parties, the afternoon teas, combined with charming drives from one elegant place to another; the siestas, the idle swinging in hammocks, with the latest magazine from which to get a topic for dinner, the mild excitement of a tete-a-tete which might discover congenial tastes or run on into an interesting attachment.  Half the charm of life, says a philosopher, is in these personal experiments.