“Yes, in a way it was an ugly period,” said Mrs. Burgoyne, placidly.  “But very comfortable, fortunately.  Fancy if he had selected Louis Quinze chairs, for example!”

Mrs. White gave her a puzzled look, and smiled.

“Come now, Mrs. Burgoyne,” said she, good-naturedly, “Confess that you are going to give us all a surprise some day, and change all this.  One sees,” said Mrs. White, elegantly, “such lovely effects in New York”

“In those upper Fifth Avenue shops—­ah, but don’t you see lovely things!” the other woman assented warmly.  “Of course, one could be always changing,” she went on.  “But I like associations with things--and changing takes so much time!  Some day we may think all this quite pretty,” she finished, with a contented glance at the comfortable ugliness of the drawing-room.

“Oh, do you suppose we shall really!” Mrs. White gave a little incredulous laugh.  She was going pretty far, and she knew it, but as a matter of fact, she was entirely unable to believe that there was a woman in the world who could afford to have what was fashionable and expensive in household furnishings or apparel, and who deliberately preferred not to have it.  That her own pretty things were no sooner established than they began to lose their charm for her, never occurred to Mrs. White:  she was a woman of conventional type, perfectly satisfied to spend her whole life in acquiring things essentially invaluable, and to use a naturally shrewd and quick intelligence in copying fashions of all sorts, small and large, as fast as advanced merchants and magazines presented them to her.  She was one of the great army of women who help to send the sale of an immoral book well up into the hundreds of thousands; she liked to spend long afternoons with a box of chocolates and a book unfit for the touch of any woman; a book that she would review for the benefit of her friends later, with a shocked wonder that “they dare print such things!” She liked to tell a man’s story, and the other women could not but laugh at her, for she was undeniably good company, and nobody ever questioned the taste of anything she ever said or did.  She was a famous gossip, for like all women, she found the private affairs of other people full of fascination, and, having no legitimate occupation, she was always at liberty to discuss them.

Yet Mrs. White was not at all an unusual woman, and, like her associates, she tacitly assumed herself to be the very flower of American womanhood.  She quoted her distinguished relatives on all occasions, the White family, in all its ramifications, supplied the correct precedent for all the world; there was no social emergency to which some cousin or aunt of Mrs. White’s had not been more than equal.  Having no children of her own, she still could silence and shame many a good mother with references to Cousin Ethel Langstroth’s “kiddies”, or to Aunt Grace Thurston’s wonderful governess.