t The Homestead. Hilton used to be just
a nice, typical New England city. It had its social ambitions and
discontents, I suppose, but no more pronounced than in any community of
fifty or sixty thousand people. It was the Summer Colony with its
liveried servants, expensive automobiles, and elaborate entertaining
that caused such discontent in Hilton.

I've seen perfectly happy and good-natured babies made cross and
irritable by putting them into a four-foot-square nursery yard. The wall
of wealth and aristocracy around Hilton has had somewhat the same effect
upon the people that it confines. If a social barrier of any sort
appears upon the horizon of my sister-in-law Edith, she is never happy
until she has climbed over it. She was in the very midst of scaling that
high and difficult barrier built up about Hilton by the Summer
Colonists, when she married Alec.

It didn't seem to me a mean or contemptible object. To endeavor to place
our name--sunk into unjust oblivion since the reverses of our
fortune--in the front ranks of social distinction, where it belonged,
impressed me as a worthy ambition. I was glad to be used in Edith's
operations. Even as a little girl something had rankled in my heart,
too, when our once unrestricted fields and hills gradually became posted
with signs such as, "Idlewold, Private Grounds," "Cedarcrest, No
Picnickers Allowed," "Grassmere, No Trespassing."

I wasn't eighteen when I had my coming-out party. It was decided, and
fully discussed in my presence, that, as young as I was, chance for
social success would be greater this fall than a year hence, when the
list of debutantes among our summer friends promised to be less
distinguished. It happened that many of these debutantes lived in Boston
in the winter, which isn't very far from Hilton, and Edith had already
laid out before me her plan of campaign in that city, where she was
going to give me a few luncheons and dinners during the month of
December, and possibly a Ball if I proved a success.

If I proved a success! No young man ever started out in business with
more exalted determination to make good than I. I used to lie awake
nights and worry for fear the next morning's mail would not contain some
cherished invitation or other. And when it did, and Edith came bearing
it triumphantly up to my room, where I was being combed, brushed and
polished by her maid, and kissed me ecstatically on the brow and
whispered, "You little winner, you!"