So now she had to throw herself upon my mercy.  “You see,” she explained, “my husband wouldn’t understand.  I may be able to change him gradually, but if I shock him all at once—­”

“My dear Mrs. van Tuiver—­” I smiled.

“You can’t really imagine!” she persisted.  “You see, he takes his social position so seriously!  And when you are conspicuous—­when everybody’s talking about what you do—­when everything that’s the least bit unusual is magnified—­”

“My dear girl!” I broke in again.  “Stop a moment and let me talk!”

“But I hate to have to think—­”

“Don’t worry about my thoughts!  They are most happy ones!  You must understand that a Socialist cannot feel about such things as you do; we work out our economic interpretation of them, and after that they are simply so much data to us.  I might meet one of your great friends, and she might snub me, but I would never think she had snubbed me—­it would be my Western accent, and my forty-cent hat, and things like that which had put me in a class in her mind.  My real self nobody can snub—­certainly not until they’ve got at it.”

“Ah!” said Sylvia, with shining eyes.  “You have your own kind of aristocracy, I see!”

“What I want,” I said, “is you.  I’m an old hen whose chickens have grown up and left her, and I want something to mother.  Your wonderful social world is just a bother to me, because it keeps me from gathering you into my arms as I’d like to.  So what you do is to think of some role for me to play, so that I can come to see you; let me be advising you about your proposed day-nursery, or let me be a tutor of something, or a nice, respectable sewing-woman who darns the toes of your silk stockings!”

She laughed.  “If you suppose that I’m allowed to wear my stockings until they have holes in them, you don’t understand the perquisites of maids.”  She thought a moment, and then added:  “You might come to trim hats for me.”

By that I knew that we were really friends.  If it does not seem to you a bold thing for Sylvia to have made a joke about my hat, it is only because you do not yet know her.  I have referred to her money-consciousness and her social-consciousness; I would be idealizing her if I did not refer to another aspect of her which appalled me when I came to realise it—­her clothes-consciousness.  She knew every variety of fabric and every shade of colour and every style of design that ever had been delivered of the frenzied sartorial imagination.  She had been trained in all the infinite minutiae which distinguished the right from the almost right; she would sweep a human being at one glance, and stick him in a pigeon hole of her mind for ever—­because of his clothes.  When later on she had come to be conscious of this clothes-consciousness, she told me that ninety-nine times out of a hundred she had found this method of appraisal adequate for the purposes of society life.  What a curious comment upon our civilization—­that all that people had to ask of one another, all they had to give to one another, should be expressible in terms of clothes!