“You’ve been relying entirely too much on your title. You’ve let yourself be misled by what the newspapers say about that sort of thing. You don’t understand--I didn’t understand until I’d been here a while, and had got my point of view straight. They’re not so excited about titles now as they used to be when they had no fashionable society of their own, and had to look abroad to gratify their instinct for social position. If you’d come five years ago----” “Just my rotten luck,” he muttered. “Your title is a good thing--properly worked. It will catch a woman, especially if she’s not well forward ‘in the push,’ as they say. But it won’t hold her. She’s likely to use you to strengthen her social position, and then to drop you, unless she has lived in England, and has had her head turned, and has become--like your middle-classes.” “But my family is away better than Surrey’s.” “Your family counts for nothing here. New York knows nothing and cares nothing about birth. Englishmen count by title only.” “Then they ran after Surrey because he was a Duke?” “Perhaps to a certain extent,” replied Honoria. “But I fancy the principal reason was that they wished to see what it was Helen had paid such a tall price for. If he had come here quietly to marry a poor girl there’d have been no stir.” “Money--money--nothing but money--always money,” sneered Frothingham. He saw the twinkle in Honoria’s eyes. “But, I say,” he protested, “you know that we over there do care for other things, too.” “So do they here, but what do they care for, first and most, in both countries?” He smiled. “It’s money first--there and here, and the world over,” she went on with bitterness under her raillery. “And among our kind of people everything else--sentiment, art, good taste even--is far behind it. How could it be otherwise? We’ve got to have money--lots of money--or we can’t have the things we most crave--luxury, deference, show. But--where are you dining to-night?” “Probably at the club.” “Excuse me a minute. I’ll just see if Mrs. Galloway will let me bring you. We’re going to the opera afterward.” She looked at him quizzically. “I think I’ll arrange to ship you off to Boston. A little vacation just now will do you no harm. And--Boston might interest you.” When she returned from the telephone it was with a cordial invitation for him from Mrs. Galloway. He said: “I’ve a letter to a Mrs. Saalfield in Boston. Do you know her?” “Yes--she’s here now, I think. But you would better keep away from her. She wouldn’t do you the least good.” “Is she out of ‘the push’?” “Oh, no--she leads it there, I believe. But she wouldn’t let you look at a girl or a widow, or any woman but herself. She’s about forty years old--it used to be the woman of thirty, but it’s the woman of forty now. Everywhere she goes she trails a train of young men. They’re afraid to look away from her. They watch her like a pack of hungry collies, and she watches them like a hen-hawk.”