saloon might be. She had never seen or dreamed of one—and for the most part was incapable of imagining a thing she hadn’t seen. She had seen great dinners and balls and meets and runs and races; she had seen garden-parties and bunches of people, mainly women—who, however, didn’t screech—at dull stuffy teas, and distinguished companies collected in splendid castles; but all this gave her no clue to a train of conversation, to any idea of a social agreement that the interest of talk, its continuity, its accumulations from season to season, shouldn’t be lost. Conversation, in Lady Barb’s experience, had never been continuous; in such a case it would surely have been a bore. It had been occasional and fragmentary, a trifle jerky, with allusions that were never explained; it had a dread of detail—it seldom pursued anything very far or kept hold of it very long. There was something else she didn’t say to her husband in reference to his visions of hospitality, which was that if she should open a saloon—she had taken up the joke as well, for Lady Barb was eminently good-natured—Mrs. Vanderdecken would straightway open another, and Mrs. Vanderdecken’s would be the more successful of the two. This lady, for reasons Lady Barb had not yet explored, passed for the great personage of New York; there were legends of her husband’s family having behind them a fabulous antiquity. When this was alluded to it was spoken of as something incalculable and lost in the dimness of time. Mrs. Vanderdecken was young, pretty, clever, incredibly pretentious, Lady Barb thought, and had a wonderfully artistic house. Ambition was expressed, further, in every rustle of her garments; and if she was the first lady in America, “bar none”—this had an immense sound—it was plain she intended to retain the character. It was not till after she had been several months in New York that Lady Barb began to perceive this easy mistress of the field, crying out, gracious goodness, before she was hurt, to have flung down the glove; and when the idea presented itself, lighted up by an incident I have no space to report, she simply blushed a little (for Mrs. Vanderdecken) and held her tongue. She hadn’t come to America to bandy words about “precedence” with such a woman as that. She had ceased to think of that convenience—of course one was obliged to think in England; though an instinct of self-preservation, old and deep-seated, led her not to expose herself to occasions on which her imputed claim might be tested. This had at bottom much to do with her having, very soon after the first flush of the honours paid her on her arrival and which seemed to her rather grossly overdone, taken the line of scarcely going out. “They can’t keep _that_ up!” she had said to herself; and in short she would stay, less boringly both for herself and for others, at home. She had a sense that whenever and wherever she might go forth she should meet Mrs. Vanderdecken, who would withhold or