Mrs. Diggs applied herself actively to a fragment of cold chicken, which she had left neglected through all these elucidating items. Claire watched her, thinking how clever she was and yet how uncircumspect. With what slight incentive had been roused this actual whirlwind of family confidences! "She perfectly adores Beverley," Mrs. Diggs presently continued. "I have an idea that she does so because he's a Thurston--or rather because _she's_ one. She has contrived to make it appear very exceptional to be a Thurston. The Thurstons have never been anything whatever. Her mother married into the family, and cast a spell of aristocracy over them. But Cornelia never alludes to the Van Kortlandt connection. She knows that can take care of itself. I believe her grandfather, on the other side, was a saddler. But she has managed to have it seriously disputed whether he was a saddler or a landed Knickerbocker grandee. The panels of her carriage bear a Thurston crest. It is a very pretty one; I am quite sure she invented it. I once told Beverley so, and he laughed. _He_ has never used it, though he has never denounced it as spurious. The joke is that she ignores the Van Horn crest entirely, which is the only one she has any right to air. Cornelia is a great leader, as I said. She has Thursday evenings in the big old house on Washington Square which her late husband left her. Lots of people have struggled to go to Cornelia's Thursdays, and not gone, after all. It's absolutely funny to observe what a vogue she has got. She could make anybody whom she chose to take up a social somebody by merely lifting her finger. But she never lifts her finger. That is why she is so run after. You can't get her to use the power she possesses. It yearly grows more of a power, don't you know, on this very account. It's like a big deposit in a bank, that gets bigger through lying there untouched. She won't spend a penny; she lets it grow. The women of New York are becoming a good deal less flippant, some of them, than they used to be. Clubs and receptions have come into fashion, where intellectual matters are seriously, even capably discussed. Somebody will read a paper on something sensible and literary, and a little debate will follow. At one of these clubs--composed strictly of women--it is forbidden to mention the last ball, though this may have occurred on the preceding night and everybody may have seen everybody else there, talking the usual gay nonsense. The whole thing is a kind of 'movement,' don't you know? It's very picturesque and it's extremely in earnest. It makes one think a little of the old historical French _salons_. It has laid bare some charming and surprising discoveries. It has shown how many women have been reading and thinking in secret, during those long intervals of leisure that have occurred between their opportunities for being publicly silly, inane, flirtatious, and hence of correct form. On the other hand it has