croll of bread and butter in
one hand and a cup of tea in the other. Large and fat, and clean-shaven,
he looked like a monk in evening dress.

"We were talking about salons," said Margaret.

"Why don't you open a salon yourself?" asked Wetmore, breathing thickly
from the anxiety of getting through the crowd without spilling his tea.

"Like poor Lady Barberina Lemon?" said the girl, with a laugh. "What a
good story! That idea of a woman who couldn't be interested in any of
the arts because she was socially and traditionally the material of
them! We can, never reach that height of nonchalance in this country."

"Not if we tried seriously?" suggested the painter. "I've an idea that
if the Americans ever gave their minds to that sort of thing, they could
take the palm--or the cake, as Beaton here would say--just as they do
in everything else. When we do have an aristocracy, it will be an
aristocracy that will go ahead of anything the world has ever seen. Why
don't somebody make a beginning, and go in openly for an ancestry, and
a lower middle class, and an hereditary legislature, and all the rest?
We've got liveries, and crests, and palaces, and caste feeling. We're
all right as far as we've gone, and we've got the money to go any
length."

"Like your natural-gas man, Mr. Beaton," said the girl, with a smiling
glance round at him.

"Ah!" said Wetmore, stirring his tea, "has Beaton got a natural-gas
man?"

"My natural-gas man," said Beaton, ignoring Wetmore's question, "doesn't
know how to live in his palace yet, and I doubt if he has any caste
feeling. I fancy his family believe themselves victims of it. They
say--one of the young ladies does--that she never saw such an unsociable
place as New York; nobody calls."

"That's good!" said Wetmore. "I suppose they're all ready for company,
too: good cook, furniture, servants, carriages?"

"Galore," said Beaton.

"Well, that's too bad. There's a chance for you, Miss Vance. Doesn't
your philanthropy embrace the socially destitute as well as the
financially? Just think of a family like that, without a friend, in
a great city! I should think common charity had a duty there--not to
mention the uncommon."

He distinguished that kind as Margaret's by a glance of ironical
deference. She had a repute for good works which was out of proportion
to the works, as it always is, but she was really active in that way,
under the vague obligation, which we now all feel, to be helpfu