suspected the truth for some time, but I've
refused to credit it. Now everything is explained. I took you at your
word; I believed in you and your husband and looked up to you as
literary people--people who were interested in fine and ennobling
things. I admired you for the very reason that I thought you didn't
care, and that you didn't need to care, about society and fashionable
position. I kept saying to you that I envied you your tastes, and let
you see that I considered myself your real inferior in my determination
to attract attention and oblige society to notice us. I was guileless
and simpleton enough to tell you of my progress--things I would have
blushed to tell another woman like myself--because I considered you the
embodiment of high aims and spiritual ideas, as far superior to mine as
the poetic star is superior to the garish electric light. I thought it
might amuse you to listen to my vanities. Instead, it seems you were
masquerading and were eating your heart out with envy of me--poor me.
You were ambitious to be like me."

"I wouldn't be like you for anything in the world."

"You couldn't if you tried. That's one of the things which this
extraordinary interview has made plain beyond the shadow of a doubt. You
are aching to be a social success. You are not fit to be. I have found
that out for certain to-day."

"It is false," exclaimed Selma, with a tragic intonation. "You do not
understand. I have no wish to be a social success. I should abhor to
spend my life after the manner of you and your associates. What I object
to, what I complain of, is that, in spite of your fine words and
pretended admiration of me, you have preferred these people, who are
exclusive without a shadow of right, to me who was your friend, and that
you have chosen to ignore me for the sake of them, and behaved as if you
thought I was not their equal or your equal. That is not friendship, it
is snobbishness--un-American snobbishness."

"It is very amusing. Amusing yet depressing," continued Flossy, without
heed to this asseveration. "You have proved one of my ideals to be a
delusion, which is sad." She had arisen and stood gently swaying pendent
by its crook her gay parasol, with her head on one side, and seeming for
once to be choosing her words judicially. "When we met first and I
nearly rushed into your arms, I was fascinated, and I said to myself
that here was the sort of American woman of whom I had dreamed--the sort
of woma