a daughter of a duke or something," she
added, wickedly. "Everybody here seems to be. Don't you feel that your
ancestors have given you the right to know whom you please?--instead of
eternally plugging the holes in the dike."

In spite of her sharpened wits, Mrs. Kaye smiled radiantly into Isabel's
guileless eyes. "I am not the daughter of a duke; I wish I were!" she
exclaimed, with a fair assumption of aristocratic frankness. "But your
point is quite correct." Again she appeared to ruminate; then added:
"The British aristocracy is to society what God is to the
world--all-sufficient, all-merciful, all-powerful."

"And she would sacrifice Him and all his archangels to an epigram,"
thought Isabel, who was somewhat shocked. "How fearfully clever you
are!" she murmured. "Do you think in epigrams?"

"Epigrams? Have I made one? I wish I could. They are immensely the
fashion."

"I should think you might have set it--"

She did not finish her sentence, for the ear to which it was addressed
suddenly closed. Lady Cecilia Spence had sauntered up, and Mrs. Kaye
hastily made room for her on the sofa, turning a shoulder upon Isabel. A
faint change, as by the agitation of depths on the far surface of
waters, rippled her features, and Isabel, summoning the impersonal
attitude, watched her curiously. It was her first experience of the snob
in a grandiose setting, but it was the type that had aroused her most
impassioned inward protest all her life: the smallest circles have their
snobs, and, like all the unchosen of mammon, she had had her corroding
experiences. But her high spirit resented the power of the baser
influences, and, with her intellect, commanded her to accept the world
with philosophy and the unsheathed weapon of self-respect. In the
present stage of the world's development it was to be expected that the
pettier characteristics of human nature would predominate; and perhaps
the intellectually exclusive would not have it otherwise.

Mrs. Kaye, polite tolerance giving place to the accent of intimacy,
began: "Oh, Lady Cecilia, have you heard--" and plunged into a piece of
gossip, no doubt of absorbing interest to those that knew the
contributory circumstances and the surnames of the actors, but to the
uninitiated as puzzling as success. Lady Cecilia's eyes twinkled
appreciatively, and her wells of laughter bubbled close to the surface.
Isabel, completely ignored, waited until the story was finished, and
then made a del