All the joys of her girl’s ambition she had tasted to the full. Every social eminence that she had seen, she had in turn attained. Each one of the diversions of a woman of fashion, she had pushed to its ultimate--gayety pure and simple, haughty and costly exclusiveness, travel and adventure, the patronage of literature and art, even religion and charity. But Mrs. Gower had been so unfortunate as to take her greatest pleasure at the beginning of her young life. Compared with that triumphal moment when first, surrounded by ladies with names she had hitherto known only in the newspapers, she had taken her place among the patronesses of the F. F. V. Ball as “Mrs. Levison Gower, Jr.”--what were all the second-hand joys of the imagination, of looking at books and pictures, even the more solid satisfactions of houses, opera-boxes, horses and liveries, or of social power? The life of the world was Mrs. Gower’s book; she made her own drama; any starveling in a garret could have the other kind. But that earliest pleasure was indeed divine. She had met the enemy, and made them hers. And how the dowagers had scowled at her, at first! The haughty Vans, the poor and lofty matrons of the old manorial families of New York, exemplary, unapproachable, Presbyterian. She had routed them with a flirt of her fan; she had dared their feudal armor with her bared fair breast. Their dowdy daughters had been snuffed out of fashion like candles in electric light; a spark of wit had made them laughable, a glance of her soft eyes had brought their brothers to her feet. Her _chic_ had won the day, and soon they all began to copy her. Her phaeton and her ponies replaced the antiquated family rockaways; her style made up for breeding, and largely it was Flossie’s work that money in New York became the all-in-all, and blood an antiquated prejudice to jest at. And all the Einsteins and the Malgams and Duvals made haste to cluster under Flossie’s standard, wanting such a leader; and we Americans throw up our hats and cry how nice and democratic is the change--do we not? How proud was simple Lucie Gower to find him husband to a goddess! How natural for Caryl Wemyss to worship her, the spirit of his favorite decadence! But still, that early and delightful triumph had been the climax of her life, as it now seemed; all other pleasures had proved silly or insipid. What gratification was it to her to move in the best society? The whole pleasure lay in getting there. She cared nothing for the best society, except in so far as she could humble it, and make it hers. Secretly, Flossie found more sympathy in her new friends of the Duval set than in the old-fashioned Van Kulls and Breviers of her husband’s family. The best people bored her. But the Duvals were nothing if not amusing, and had a truly French horror of the _ennuyeux_.