"How I do run on! In _vino veritas_--there's some class to pickled truth! Here are olives for thought, red peppers for honesty, onions for logic--and cauliflower for constancy--and fifty-seven other varieties, Clive--all absent in the canned make-up of the modern man. "'When you and I behind the veil have passed'--but they don't wear veils now; and now is our chance. "We'll never take it. Hall-marks are our only guide. When absent we merely become vicious. We know what we want; we know what we ought to have; but we're too cowardly to go after it. And so are you. And so am I. "Yours-- "REEVE." CHAPTER XVIII During that first year Athalie Greensleeve saw a great deal of New York society, professionally, and of many New York men, socially. But the plaything which society attempted to make of her she gently but adroitly declined to become. She herself drew this line whenever it was necessary to draw it, never permitting herself to mistake the fundamental attitude of these agreeable and amicably demonstrative people toward her, or toward any girl who lived alone in New York and who practised such a profession. Not among the people who employed her and who paid her lavishly for an evening's complacency; not among people who sought her at her own place during business hours for professional advice or for lighter amusement could she expect any other except professional recognition. And after a few months of wistful loneliness she came, gradually, to desire from these people nothing except what they gave. But there were some people she met during that first year's practice of her new profession who seemed to be unimpressed by the popular belief in such an awesome actuality as New York "society." And some of these, oddly enough, were the descendants of those who, perhaps, had formed part of the only real society the big, raw, sprawling city ever had. But that was long, long ago, in the day of the first President. New York will always be spotted with the symptoms but will never again have it. Paris has gone the same way. London is still flushed with it, Berlin hectic, Vienna fevered. But the days of a "society" as a distinct _ensemble_, with a logical reason for being, with authority, with functions, with offensive and defensive powers and fixed boundaries, is over forever; possibly never existed, certainly never will exist in the series of gregarious aggregations and segregations known to a perplexed and slightly amused world as the city of New York. For Athalie that first year of new interests and of unfamiliar successes passed more rapidly than had any single month ever before passed in her life since the strenuous and ragged days of childhood. It was a year of novelty, of excitement, of self-development, and the development of interests as new as they had been unsuspected.