m him as much as you do. How
charming you are looking this morning! I wish I had your secret of
not letting this life tell on one." And she was gone in a shower of
compliments and smiles and caressing ways. She had found out what she
came to find out. Mr. Henderson needs watching, she said to herself.

The interview, as Margaret thought it over, was amusing, but it did not
raise her spirits. Was everybody worldly and shallow? Was this the sort
of woman whom Mr. Henderson fancied? Was Mr. Henderson the sort of man
to whom such a woman would be attracted?

IX

It was a dinner party in one of the up-town houses--palaces--that
begin to repeat in size, spaciousness of apartments, and decoration the
splendor of the Medicean merchant princes. It is the penalty that we pay
for the freedom of republican opportunity that some must be very rich.
This is the logical outcome of the open chance for everybody to be
rich--and it is the surest way to distinction. In a free country the
course must be run, and it is by the accumulation of great wealth that
one can get beyond anxiety, and be at liberty to indulge in republican
simplicity.

Margaret and Miss Arbuser were ushered in through a double row of
servants in livery--shortclothes and stockings--in decorous vacuity--an
array necessary to bring into relief the naturalness and simplicity of
the entertainers. Vulgarity, one can see, consists in making one's self
a part of the display of wealth: the thing to be attained is personal
simplicity on a background of the richest ostentation. It is difficult
to attain this, and theory says that it takes three generations for a
man to separate himself thus from his display. It was the tattle of the
town that the first owner of the pictures in the gallery of the Stott
mansion used to tell the prices to his visitors; the third owner is
quite beyond remembering them. He might mention, laughingly, that the
ornamented shovel in the great fireplace in the library was decorated by
Vavani--it was his wife's fancy. But he did not say that the ceiling
in the music-room was painted by Pontifex Lodge, or that six Italian
artists had worked four years making the Corean room, every inch of
it exquisite as an intaglio--indeed, the reporters had made the town
familiar with the costly facts.

The present occupants understood quite well the value of a background:
the house swarmed with servants--retainers, one might say. Margaret, who
was fresh from h