Yes! Kitty was heartily welcome to the stranger in an unknown territory. Mrs. Hitt was not intellectual, and judged by standards Arthur Cornell’s wife had come to revere sincerely, she was not especially refined in speech and bearing. Or were Susie’s tastes too quiet and her ideas old-fashioned, that her interlocutor’s crisp sayings sounded pert, and the bright brown eyes and fixed flush upon the cheekbones were artificially aggressive? Her former chum had always been warm-hearted, if inconveniently outspoken. And she was a New Yorker, and fashionable. Susie’s cherished ambition, unavowed even to Arthur while it was expedient for them to live simply, was to be fashionable, brilliant, and courted—a member in good and regular standing in the Society of which Mrs. Sherwood lectured, and Ellen Olney Kirk wrote, and to which Jenkyns Knickerbocker was _au fait_. A certain something that was not air or tone, deportment or attire, and yet partook of all these as pot-pourri of rose-breath, spices, and perfumed oils—marked Kitty Hitt as an _habituée_ of the charmed Reserve. She was not, perhaps, one of the Four Hundred selected from the Upper Ten Thousand by processes as arbitrary, to human judgment, as those by which Gideon’s three hundred were picked out from the hosts of Israel. Susie was no simpleton, albeit ambitious. Mr. Hitt was a stockbroker; hence manifestly in the line of promotion, but there were degrees of elevation upon even Olympus. Her imagination durst not lift eyes to the cloud-wreathed summit where chief gods held revel, guarded from vulgar intrusion by Gabriel Macallister. The climate and manner of life a few leagues lower down would, as she felt, suit her better than the rarified atmosphere of the extremest heights. She had always meant to climb, and successfully, when time and opportunity should serve. From the moment the passage of the river was determined upon as a business necessity, she felt intuitively that both of these were near. “We think them cozy!” she assented quietly to the visitor’s praise of her rooms. “Cozy! they are _lovely_!” While she talked she raised her eye-glasses to make note of some fine etchings upon the walls and a choice water-color upon an easel, and took in, in passing, the circumstance that the rugs laid upon the polished floor were of prime quality, although neither large nor numerous. “I do hope you don’t mean to shut yourself up in your pretty cage as so many pattern wives and mothers—particularly Brooklyn women” (roguishly) “do? That’s the reason American society is so crude and colorless. With your face and figure and accomplishments (I haven’t forgotten how divinely you recite) you ought to become a Social Success—a star in the world of Society. You ought indeed!” drowning the feeble murmur of dissent. “There’s many a so-named leader of the gay world who doesn’t hold, and who never did hold such a card. Just trust yourself to me, and I will prove all I promise.”