The two young ladies who had dropped into French looked at each other for a moment after Irene moved away, and one of them spoke for both when she exclaimed:  “Did you ever see such rudeness in a drawing-room!  Who could have dreamed that she understood?” Mrs. Benson had been established very comfortably in a corner with Professor Slem, who was listening with great apparent interest to her accounts of the early life in Ohio.  Irene seemed relieved to get away into the open air, but she was in a mood that Mr. King could not account for.  Upon the veranda they encountered Miss Lamont and the artist, whose natural enjoyment of the scene somewhat restored her equanimity.  Could there be anything more refined and charming in the world than this landscape, this hospitable, smiling house, with the throng of easy-mannered, pleasant-speaking guests, leisurely flowing along in the conventional stream of social comity.  One must be a churl not to enjoy it.  But Irene was not sorry when, presently, it was time to go, though she tried to extract some comfort from her mother’s enjoyment of the occasion.  It was beautiful.  Mr. Benson was in a calculating mood.  He thought it needed a great deal of money to make things run so smoothly.

Why should one inquire in such a paradise if things do run smoothly?  Cannot one enjoy a rose without pulling it up by the roots?  I have no patience with those people who are always looking on the seamy side.  I agree with the commercial traveler who says that it will only be in the millennium that all goods will be alike on both sides.  Mr. King made the acquaintance in Newport of the great but somewhat philosophical Mr. Snodgrass, who is writing a work on “The Discomforts of the Rich,” taking a view of life which he says has been wholly overlooked.  He declares that their annoyances, sufferings, mortifications, envies, jealousies, disappointments, dissatisfactions (and so on through the dictionary of disagreeable emotions), are a great deal more than those of the poor, and that they are more worthy of sympathy.  Their troubles are real and unbearable, because they are largely of the mind.  All these are set forth with so much powerful language and variety of illustration that King said no one could read the book without tears for the rich of Newport, and he asked Mr. Snodgrass why he did not organize a society for their relief.  But the latter declared that it was not a matter for levity.  The misery is real.  An imaginary case would illustrate his meaning.  Suppose two persons quarrel about a purchase of land, and one builds a stable on his lot so as to shut out his neighbor’s view of the sea.  Would not the one suffer because he could not see the ocean, and the other by reason of the revengeful state of his mind?  He went on to argue that the owner of a splendid villa might have, for reasons he gave, less content in it than another person in a tiny cottage so small that it had no spare room for his mother-in-law even, and that