wise, she
saw instantly.

"Really? It is so difficult to understand that duchesses
are interesting--out of novels; and the green-grocers'
wives are a good deal alike, too, aren't they?"

"It's the contrast; you see our duchesses were
green-grocers' wives the day before yesterday, and our
green-grocers' wives subscribe to the magazines. It's
all mixed up, and there are no high lights anywhere. You
move before us in a sort of panoramic pageant," Elfrida
went on, determined to redeem her point, "with your Queen
and Empress of India--she ought to be riding on an
elephant, oughtn't she?--in front, and all your princes
and nobles with their swords drawn to protect her. Then
your Upper Classes and your Upper Middle Classes walking
stiffly two and two; and then your Lower Middle Classes
with large families, dropping their h's; and then your
hideous people from the slums. And besides," she added,
with prettily repressed enthusiasm, "there is the shadowy
procession of all the people that have gone before, and
we can see that you are a good deal like them, though
they are more interesting still. It is very pictorial."
She stopped suddenly and consciously, as if she had said
too much, and Janet felt that she was suggestively
apologized to.

"Doesn't the phenomenal squash make up for all that?"
she asked. "It would to me. I'm dying to see the phenomenal
squash, and the prodigious water-melon, and--"

"And the falls of Niagara?" Elfrida put in, with the
faintest turning down of the corners of her mouth. "I'm
afraid our wonders are chiefly natural, and largely
vegetable, as you say."

"But they are wonders. Everything here has been measured
so many times. Besides, haven't you got the elevated
railway, and a statue of Liberty, and the 'Jeanne d'Arc,'
and W. D. Howells! To say nothing of a whole string of
poets--good gray poets that wear beards and laurels, and
fanciful young ones that dance in garlands on the back
pages of the _Century_. Oh, I know them all, the dear
things! And I'm quite sure their ideas are indigenous to
the soil."

Elfrida let her eyes tell her appreciation, and also the
fact that she would take courage now, she was gaining
confidence. "I'm glad you like them," she said. "Howells
would do if he would stop writing about virtuous
sewing-girls, and give us some real _romans psychologiques_.
But he is too much afraid of soiling his hands, that
monsieur; his _betes humaines_ are always conventionalized,