“I can tell you that I wasn’t.  But I suppose that in a real exigency, I could truckle to the proprietary Dryfooses as well as you.”

“Oh no; you mustn’t, dear!  I’m a woman, and I’m dreadfully afraid.  But you must always be a man, especially with that horrid old Mr. Dryfoos.  Promise me that you’ll never yield the least point to him in a matter of right and wrong!”

“Not if he’s right and I’m wrong?”

“Don’t trifle, dear!  You know what I mean.  Will you promise?”

“I’ll promise to submit the point to you, and let you do the yielding.  As for me, I shall be adamant.  Nothing I like better.”

“They’re dreadful, even that poor, good young fellow, who’s so different from all the rest; he’s awful, too, because you feel that he’s a martyr to them.”

“And I never did like martyrs a great deal,” March interposed.

“I wonder how they came to be there,” Mrs. March pursued, unmindful of his joke.

“That is exactly what seemed to be puzzling Miss Mela about us.  She asked, and I explained as well as I could; and then she told me that Miss Vance had come to call on them and invited them; and first they didn’t know how they could come till they thought of making Conrad bring them.  But she didn’t say why Miss Vance called on them.  Mr. Dryfoos doesn’t employ her on ‘Every Other Week.’  But I suppose she has her own vile little motive.”

“It can’t be their money; it can’t be!” sighed Mrs. March.

“Well, I don’t know.  We all respect money.”

“Yes, but Miss Vance’s position is so secure.  She needn’t pay court to those stupid, vulgar people.”

“Well, let’s console ourselves with the belief that she would, if she needed.  Such people as the Dryfooses are the raw material of good society.  It isn’t made up of refined or meritorious people—­professors and litterateurs, ministers and musicians, and their families.  All the fashionable people there to-night were like the Dryfooses a generation or two ago.  I dare say the material works up faster now, and in a season or two you won’t know the Dryfooses from the other plutocrats.  They will—­a little better than they do now; they’ll see a difference, but nothing radical, nothing painful.  People who get up in the world by service to others—­through letters, or art, or science—­may have their modest little misgivings as to their social value, but people that rise by money—­especially if their gains are sudden—­never have.  And that’s the kind of people that form our nobility; there’s no use pretending that we haven’t a nobility; we might as well pretend we haven’t first-class cars in the presence of a vestibuled Pullman.  Those girls had no more doubt of their right to be there than if they had been duchesses:  we thought it was very nice of Miss Vance to come and ask us, but they didn’t; they weren’t afraid, or the least embarrassed; they were perfectly natural—­like born aristocrats.  And you may be sure that if the plutocracy that now owns the country ever sees fit to take on the outward signs of an aristocracy—­titles, and arms, and ancestors—­it won’t falter from any inherent question of its worth.  Money prizes and honors itself, and if there is anything it hasn’t got, it believes it can buy it.”