“What I want,” I said, “is you. I’m an old hen whose chickens have grown up and left her, and I want something to mother. Your wonderful social world is just a bother to me, because it keeps me from gathering you into my arms as I’d like to. So what you do is to think of some role for me to play, so that I can come to see you; let me be advising you about your proposed day-nursery, or let me be a tutor of something, or a nice, respectable sewing-woman who darns the toes of your silk stockings!” She laughed. “If you suppose that I’m allowed to wear my stockings until they have holes in them, you don’t understand the perquisites of maids.” She thought a moment, and then added: “You might come to trim hats for me.” By that I knew that we were really friends. If it does not seem to you a bold thing for Sylvia to have made a joke about my hat, it is only because you do not yet know her. I have referred to her money-consciousness and her social-consciousness; I would be idealizing her if I did not refer to another aspect of her which appalled me when I came to realise it--her clothes-consciousness. She knew every variety of fabric and every shade of colour and every style of design that ever had been delivered of the frenzied sartorial imagination. She had been trained in all the infinite minutiae which distinguished the right from the almost right; she would sweep a human being at one glance, and stick him in a pigeon hole of her mind for ever--because of his clothes. When later on she had come to be conscious of this clothes-consciousness, she told me that ninety-nine times out of a hundred she had found this method of appraisal adequate for the purposes of society life. What a curious comment upon our civilization--that all that people had to ask of one another, all they had to give to one another, should be expressible in terms of clothes! 16. I had set out to educate Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver in the things I thought she needed to know. A part of my programme was to find some people of modern sympathies whom she might meet without offence to her old prejudices. The first person I thought of was Mrs. Jessie Frothingham, who was the head of a fashionable girls’ school, just around the corner from Miss Abercrombie’s where Sylvia herself had received the finishing touch. Mrs. Frothingham’s was as exclusive and expensive a school as the most proper person could demand, and great was Sylvia’s consternation when I told her that its principal was a member of the Socialist party, and made no bones about speaking in public for us.