and the prospects to justify them in looking higher socially--in
looking among the very rich and really fashionable. In the Hanging
Rock sort of community, having all the snobbishness of Fifth Avenue,
Back Bay, and Rittenhouse Square, with the added torment of the
snobbishness being perpetually ungratified--in such communities,
beneath a surface reeking culture and idealistic folderol, there is a
coarse and brutal materialism, a passion for money, for luxury, for
display, that equals aristocratic societies at their worst. No one can
live for a winter, much less grow up, in such a place without becoming
saturated with sycophantry. Thus, only by some impossible combination
of chances could there have been at Hanging Rock a young man who would
have appreciated Mildred and have had the courage of his appreciation.
This combination did not happen. In Mildred's generation and set there
were only the two classes of men noted above. The men of the one of
them which could not have attracted her accepted their fate of mating
with second-choice females to whom they were themselves second choice.
The men of the other class rarely appeared at Hanging Rock functions,
hung about the rich people in New York, Newport, and on Long Island,
and would as soon have thought of taking a Hanging Rock society girl to
wife as of exchanging hundred-dollar bills for twenty-five-cent pieces.
Having attractions acceptable in the best markets, they took them
there. Hanging Rock denounced them as snobs, for Hanging Rock was
virtuously eloquent on the subject of snobbishness--we human creatures
being never so effective as when assailing in others the vice or
weakness we know from lifelong, intimate, internal association with it.
But secretly the successfully ambitious spurners of that suburban
society were approved, were envied. And Hanging Rock was most gracious
to them whenever it got the chance.

In her five years of social life Mildred had gone only with the various
classes of fashionable people, had therefore known only the men who are
full of the poison of snobbishness. She had been born and bred in an
environment as impregnated with that poison as the air of a
kitchen-garden with onions. She knew nothing else. The secret
intention to refuse Stanley Baird, should he propose, was therefore the
more astonishing--and the more significant. From time to time in any
given environment you will find some isolated person, some personality,
with a