that there were lines of social cleavage in the
town; that there were whist clubs, and dancing clubs and women's clubs,
and in a general way that the women who composed these clubs made up our
best society, and that those benighted souls beyond the pale of these
clubs were out of the caste. We knew that certain persons whose names
were always handed in on the lists of guests at parties were what we
called "howling swells," but it remained for Miss Larrabee to sort out
ten or a dozen of these "howling swells," who belonged to the strictest
social caste in town, and call them "howling dervishes." Incidentally it
may be said that both Miss Larrabee and her mother were dervishes, but
that did not prevent her from making sport of them. From Miss Larrabee
we learned that the high priestess of the howling dervishes of our
society was Mrs. Mortimer Conklin, known by the sisterhood of the mosque
as Priscilla Winthrop. We in our office had never heard her called by
that name, but Miss Larrabee explained, rather elaborately, that unless
one was permitted to speak of Mrs. Conklin thus, one was quite beyond
the hope of a social heaven.

In the first place, Priscilla Winthrop was Mrs. Conklin's maiden name;
in the second place, it links her with the Colonial Puritan stock of
which she is so justly proud--being scornful of mere Daughters of the
Revolution--and finally, though Mrs. Conklin is a grandmother, her
maiden name seems to preserve the sweet, vague illusion of girlhood
which Mrs. Conklin always carries about her like the shadow of a dream.
And Miss Larrabee punctuated this with a wink which we took to be a
quotation mark, and she went on with her work. So we knew we had been
listening to the language used in the temple.

Our town was organized fifty years ago by Abolitionists from New
England, and twenty years ago, when Alphabetical Morrison was getting
out one of the numerous boom editions of his real estate circular, he
printed an historical article therein in which he said that Priscilla
Winthrop was the first white child born on the town site. Her father was
territorial judge, afterward member of the State Senate, and after ten
years spent in mining in the far West, died in the seventies, the
richest man in the State. It was known that he left Priscilla, his only
child, half a million dollars in government bonds.

She was the first girl in our town to go away to school. Naturally, she
went to Oberlin, famous in those da