As Isabel left her horse at a livery-stable and walked up the wide clean boulevard towards her friend's house, she met no one on the glaring pavements, although here and there a buggy was hitched, and a patient horse stood with his fore feet on the line of grass beside the concrete, his head under a tree, and his eyes fixed expectantly upon the door of the house. Indeed one might walk here at almost any hour of the day and rarely meet another; all the energies were concentrated in Main Street, although it was the town's standing grievance that it was not the county-seat with a court-house that should make the pretensions of St. Peter ridiculous. No small part of those energies in the business district were devoted to humbling the rival, in the matter of commerce. St. Peter retaliated with the accent of a fierce contempt. "Chickenville!" "The Eggopolis!" quoth the local wits, and who shall say that the darts did not quiver and sting, although the more flourishing community never lowered its self-satisfied front? Even the rich banker families were not at the trouble to put on airs. They did not possess a handsome turnout between them, and as for dress there were few that did more than keep themselves cool in summer and warm in winter. It was true that Mr. Boutts possessed a runabout automobile in which he bumped his family to San Francisco occasionally, but he was of the newer gentry and owed his social pre-eminence to his wife and pretty daughter, and to his conversion from the Congregational to the Episcopal Church. Isabel, of course, was a conspicuous member of the ancient aristocracy, by virtue of her forefathers having owned half the county when the smoke still rose from the wigwam; and although Mrs. James Otis had maintained a haughty aloofness on her husband's ranch in summer, and later in a Rosewater cottage, her neighbors thought none the less of her for that, and Isabel, after school hours, played with their children. Later, even the transgressions of her father, and her unchaperoned trip to Europe, left her position secure. An Otis was an Otis. _Noblesse oblige._ Aristocracies are aristocracies the world over.