She did not believe everything he said, of course, or take all his chivalrous speeches quite seriously.  But obviously, some of it was said in all honesty, she thought, or why should he take the trouble to say it?  And the nearness of his bracing personality blew across the artificial atmosphere in which she lived like the cool breath of great moors or of virgin forests.  Genius and work and success became the real things of life; money but a mere accident.  A horrible sense of the unreality of everything that surrounded her began to oppress Susan.  She saw the poisoned undercurrent of this glittering and exquisite existence, the selfishness, the cruelties, the narrowness.  She saw its fundamental insincerity.  In a world where wrongs were to be righted, and ignorance enlightened, and childhood sheltered and trained, she began to think it strange that strong, and young, and wealthy men and women should be content to waste enormous sums of money upon food to which they scarcely ever brought a normal appetite, upon bridge-prizes for guests whose interest in them scarcely survived the moment of unwrapping the dainty beribboned boxes in which they came, upon costly toys for children whose nurseries were already crowded with toys.  She wondered that they should think it worth while to spend hours and days in harassing dressmakers and milliners, to make a brief appearance in the gowns they were so quickly ready to discard, that they should gratify every passing whim so instantly that all wishes died together, like little plants torn up too soon.

The whole seemed wonderful and beautiful still.  But the parts of this life, seriously analyzed, seemed to turn to dust and ashes.  Of course, a hundred little shop-girls might ache with envy at reading that Mrs. Harvey Brock was to give her debutante daughter a fancy-dress ball, costing ten thousand dollars, and might hang wistfully over the pictures of Miss Peggy Brock in her Dresden gown with her ribbon-tied crook; but Susan knew that Peggy cried and scolded the whole afternoon, before the dance, because Teddy Russell was not coming, that young Martin Brock drank too much on that evening and embarrassed his entire family before he could be gotten upstairs, and that Mrs. Brock considered the whole event a failure because some favors, for which she had cabled to Paris, did not come, and the effect of the german was lost.  Somehow, the “lovely and gifted heiress” of the newspapers never seemed to Susan at all reconcilable with Dolly Ripley, vapid, overdressed, with diamonds sparkling about her sallow throat, and the “jolly impromptu” trip of the St. Johns to New York lost its point when one knew it was planned because the name of young Florence St. John had been pointedly omitted from Ella Saunders dance list.

Boasting, lying, pretending—­how weary Susan got of it all!  She was too well schooled to smile when Ella, meeting the Honorable Mary Saunders and Sir Charles Saunders, of London, said magnificently, “We bear the same arms, Sir Charles, but of course ours is the colonial branch of the family!” and she nodded admiringly at Dolly Ripley’s boyish and blunt fashion of saying occasionally “We Ripleys,—­oh, we drink and gamble and do other things, I admit; we’re not saints!  But we can’t lie, you know!”