"Gladys dear, momma wouldn’t like you to use that kind of language. Remember that now we must carry out her wishes all the more because she isn’t able to enforce them. Your companions may not always be Hattie Belweather and Sunshine Bright, and so—" "Say, Gus, what’s struck you? Has goin’ out in a swell rig like this gone to your head?" "Yes, dear; perhaps it has. And if you’ll take my advice you’ll let it go to yours." The only immediate response from Gladys was a cocking of the eye and a "clk" of the tongue against the cheek, something like a Zulu vowel; but Gussie noticed that in Palisade Park, where they descended from the car to make Bob’s acquaintance, Gladys reverted to the intonation and idiom in which she had first picked up her English. The jaunt tended to deepen the sensation which had been creeping over the girls within the past few days, that they were heroines of a dramatic romance. They had figured in the papers, their beauty, personalities, and histories becoming points of vital national concern. One legend made them the scions of an ancient English family fallen on evil days, but now to be revived through alliance with the Collinghams, while another came near enough to the truth to embody the Scarborough tradition and connect them with the historic house in Cambridge. In no case was there any waste of the picturesque, the detail that Jennie had been an artist’s model and "the most beautiful woman in America" being especially underscored. It was only little by little that Gussie and Gladys came to a sense of this importance, thus finding themselves enabled to react to some small degree against their sense of disgrace. In the shop, Gussie had heard Corinne whisper to a customer: "That pretty girl over there is the sister of Follett, who murdered Flynn, and whose sister made that romantic marriage with the banker." Though she glanced up from the feather she was twisting only through the tail of her eye, Gussie could reckon the excitement caused by this announcement. When it had been made a second time, and a third, as new customers came in, she saw herself an asset to the shop. Stared at, wondered at, discussed, and appraised, she began to feel as princesses and actresses when recognized in streets. Similarly, Hattie Belweather had run to Gladys to report what Miss Flossie Grimm had said over the counter, in the intervals of displaying stockings. "See that little red-headed, snub-nosed thing over there? That’s the Follett child, sister to the guy that shot the detective and the girl that married the banker sport. Some hummer he must be. Jennie, the married one’s name is. They say she’s had an offer of a hundred plunks a week to go into vawdeville. Fast color? Oh, my, yes! We don’t carry any other kind." Thus Gladys began to find it difficult to discern between notoriety and eminence, moving among the other cash girls as a queen incognita among ordinary mortals.