“What’s her social position?” he inquired of Mrs. Dangerfield the next day. “I can’t make it out at all—it’s so contradictory. She strikes me as having much cultivation and much spirit. Her appearance, too, is very neat. Yet her parents are complete little burghers. That’s easily seen.” “Oh, social position,” and Mrs. Dangerfield nodded two or three times portentously. “What big expressions you use! Do you think everybody in the world has a social position? That’s reserved for an infinitely small majority of mankind. You can’t have a social position at Utica any more than you can have an opera-box. Pandora hasn’t got one; where, if you please, should she have got it? Poor girl, it isn’t fair of you to make her the subject of such questions as that.” “Well,” said Vogelstein, “if she’s of the lower class it seems to me very—very—” And he paused a moment, as he often paused in speaking English, looking for his word. “Very what, dear Count?” “Very significant, very representative.” “Oh dear, she isn’t of the lower class,” Mrs. Dangerfield returned with an irritated sense of wasted wisdom. She liked to explain her country, but that somehow always required two persons. “What is she then?” “Well, I’m bound to admit that since I was at home last she’s a novelty. A girl like that with such people—it _is_ a new type.” “I like novelties”—and Count Otto smiled with an air of considerable resolution. He couldn’t however be satisfied with a demonstration that only begged the question; and when they disembarked in New York he felt, even amid the confusion of the wharf and the heaps of disembowelled baggage, a certain acuteness of regret at the idea that Pandora and her family were about to vanish into the unknown. He had a consolation however: it was apparent that for some reason or other—illness or absence from town—the gentleman to whom she had written had not, as she said, come down. Vogelstein was glad—he couldn’t have told you why—that this sympathetic person had failed her; even though without him Pandora had to engage single-handed with the United States Custom-House. Our young man’s first impression of the Western world was received on the landing-place of the German steamers at Jersey City—a huge wooden shed covering a wooden wharf which resounded under the feet, an expanse palisaded with rough-hewn piles that leaned this way and that, and bestrewn with masses of heterogeneous luggage. At one end; toward the town, was a row of tall painted palings, behind which he could distinguish a press of hackney-coachmen, who brandished their whips and awaited their victims, while their voices rose, incessant, with a sharp strange sound, a challenge at once fierce and familiar. The whole place, behind the fence, appeared to bristle and resound. Out there was America, Count Otto said to himself, and he looked toward it with a sense that he should have to muster resolution. On the wharf people were