In that good-natured society neither her comparative poverty nor her wage-earning in any way debarred her from such social place and power as a girl may have. And in America a girl may have much of both. Washington is an _omnium gatherum_. All conditions of men and women, of all ages and of most sorts and most races circle about the White House. But it has its select set—the word “select” is its own, and need not be analyzed too closely. Ivy had its _entrée_. To the superficial few in it, who cared for and gaged such things in the wrong way, her undoubted relation to the British peerage “cut far more ice” than did the fact that she worked—or was assumed to—for her living; and that she lived with Sir Charles and Lady Snow and called them “Charlie” and “Emma” threw a very becoming garniture of ermine over her simple and not always very new gowns. To do the girl’s own common sense and practical intelligence but scant justice, it was not the fact that she worked for a wage that was, she thought, her cramping detriment, but the shabby fact that she could not dress on anything approaching a parity with the girls who were her companions and friends. It was that that galled her. And she did feel that there was some ignominy in the small drudgery-way in which she earned her living. A people who boasted Emma Eames and cringed to Hetty Green could not consistently look too coldly on a girl who earned her living in a superior, if small, way; especially when every one knew that Lady Snow’s cousin, Miss Gilbert, could be presented at the Court of St. James any time she liked, if she were in England and had the price (of credit) of the train and feathers. And Ivy knew it. But she despised her own line of thrift—if others did not—perhaps a little because she followed it so lamely and sourly. Discontent often breeds shame. The English girl had been kindly treated by kindly Washington—handsomely treated, even, but she always had felt an outsider. At home—in London—her own birth and environment had perched her more or less on a social fence. And in Washington her dress-skimp kept her so—at least in her own opinion.