Hobart did invite Thurley to the family dinner party. With customary tardiness the invitation did not reach her until the afternoon of the day, late afternoon in fact, after a fatiguing round of “polishings off,” as she dubbed them, and an hour with Miss Clergy during which she had read aloud from an archaic little romance and had listened to the ghost-lady murmur her opinions. Very swiftly it was becoming clear to Thurley that fame, even the great, dazzling fame of which the workaday world reads with awe, merely meant one had a different standard of values; that all emotions such as joy, sorrow, anger, renunciation, cowardice, heroism and so on were relative. Tom Jones and wife and child in Skiddeoot, Missouri, might attain as great joy over acquiring a terrifically green-colored bungalow and veneered mahogany to decorate the parlor, while Mrs. Tom was to have a woman to wash, and Mr. Tom membership in the Skiddeoot bowling club—quite as much joy as Ernestine Christian when she stayed at Buckingham Palace an honored guest and had on her dressing table the miniatures of the young princes and a certain jewelled box given her by the king of Italy. The lives of these luminaries, when one came to know them on equal footing, were composed of a multitude of trivial details, the same as were the Joneses’ of Skiddeoot—the proper breakfast food, annoyance of a thunder shower, the wrong-sized-gaiters, the intense dislike of parsnips, the fondness for Japanese prints, the staunch conviction as to when the world was to end, the way to eat one’s melons (in Skiddeoot it would be porridge), the best style of spring motor car (in Skiddeoot it would be whether to have the Ford wheels red or yellow)—and so on through an endless list of things about which physical and mental existence is centered. Thurley had been exceptionally spared the grind and slow advancement of the average artist. On the other hand, she had experienced both grind and decidedly depressing experiences during her travels in the box-car. She was now placed, as it were, in the front ranks of the artistic world and allowed to gaze about, investigate, presume, acquire knowledge, as much as her own possibilities would permit. Her possibilities being above the average, Thurley, inside of the few months in New York, had come to the settled conviction that folks were really just folks no matter how they were dressed, and the artists quite the same as the population of Birge’s Corners, only in a different setting and with a different set of values.