“It’s a beautiful house and the best of everything in it. And how Mrs. Harrison does love it! She takes good care of things too, and she won’t let you be extravagant, not that I’d want to. She was brought up in a convent, you know, and she’s neat as wax.” This to Fliss was irrelevant. “Is she crazy about her husband?” But there she blundered. A reticence came over Ellen’s whole manner. Admitted though she might be to the sight of her employer’s feelings, it was not in Ellen to gossip about them. She was willing to tell Fliss about the pattern of Cecily’s silver and the drawn-work in her lunch cloths, but what she saw of Cecily’s emotions was revealed to her in a kind of unconscious confidence and Ellen was incapable of betraying it. “Of course,” she said shortly, and there was no way of expanding the point. For the second time Fliss felt a little ashamed. She took another sandwich and was silent. Mrs. Horton’s guests began to arrive and Fliss had to greet them before they took their places at the four bridge tables crowded together in the living-room. They were middle-aged ladies in silk dresses, who took their hats off in Mrs. Horton’s bedroom, used her face powder profusely and then settled down to a game of bridge which was surprisingly cut-throat. On the mantel two packages wrapped in tissue paper stimulated them immensely. Not that the prize--possibly a brass-plated candlestick or a pair of stockings--(silk to the knee)--was of any great value, but the idea of getting something for nothing enthralled them. Their faces grew shrewd and their glances at their opponents inimical; and the table bell which rang now and then as the signal to move from one table to the next was also the signal for a burst of discussion, commiseration and congratulation. Fliss knew them all. Most of them belonged to the district in town holding the brown house whence she had persuaded her parents to move, and she had no good word for them. They were good ladies, addicted to boudoir caps in the morning, who liked to gossip and did it generously. But they were kindly enough, good to their families and on the whole unambitious and satisfied. And for this last quality it was hardest for Fliss to tolerate them. They were so settled; they did not recognize Fliss as a person of ambition, calling her Flissy and speaking about her age, her hair, her dress; comparing her to Clara or Jessie whom Fliss had known in grammar school and who now were stenographers or department store clerks. If they had stood a little in awe of Fliss she would have been much more kindly. But to them she was just “pretty little Flissy Horton” and she knew it.