The trouble with this attitude was that it adjusted nothing, improved nothing, left everything to drift on toward an indefinite end. If Lester had married Jennie and accepted the comparatively meager income of ten thousand a year he would have maintained the same attitude to the end. It would have led him to a stolid indifference to the social world of which now necessarily he was a part. He would have drifted on with a few mentally compatible cronies who would have accepted him for what he was—a good fellow—and Jennie in the end would not have been so much better off than she was now. One of the changes which was interesting was that the Kanes transferred their residence to New York. Mrs. Kane had become very intimate with a group of clever women in the Eastern four hundred, or nine hundred, and had been advised and urged to transfer the scene of her activities to New York. She finally did so, leasing a house in Seventy-eighth Street, near Madison Avenue. She installed a novelty for her, a complete staff of liveried servants, after the English fashion, and had the rooms of her house done in correlative periods. Lester smiled at her vanity and love of show. “You talk about your democracy,” he grunted one day. “You have as much democracy as I have religion, and that’s none at all.” “Why, how you talk!” she denied. “I am democratic. We all run in classes. You do. I’m merely accepting the logic of the situation.” “The logic of your grandmother! Do you call a butler and doorman in red velvet a part of the necessity of the occasion?” “I certainly do,” she replied. “Maybe not the necessity exactly, but the spirit surely. Why should you quarrel? You’re the first one to insist on perfection—to quarrel if there is any flaw in the order of things.” “You never heard me quarrel.” “Oh, I don’t mean that literally. But you demand perfection—the exact spirit of the occasion, and you know it.” “Maybe I do, but what has that to do with your democracy?” “I am democratic. I insist on it. I’m as democratic in spirit as any woman. Only I see things as they are, and conform as much as possible for comfort’s sake, and so do you. Don’t you throw rocks at my glass house, Mister Master. Yours is so transparent I can see every move you make inside.” “I’m democratic and you’re not,” he teased; but he approved thoroughly of everything she did. She was, he sometimes fancied, a better executive in her world than he was in his.