Miss Minster was perfectly aware that other young ladies, similarly situated, got on very well indeed, without ever fluttering so much as a feather for a flight toward the ether beyond their own personal atmosphere; but she did not clearly comprehend what it was that they did like. She had seen something of their daily life--perhaps more of their amusements than of their occupations--and it was not wholly intelligible to her. They seemed able to extract entertainment from a host of things which were to her almost uninteresting. During her few visits to New York, Newport, and Saratoga, for the most part made during her father’s lifetime, people had been extremely kind to her, and had done their best to make her feel that there existed for her, ready made, a very notable social position. She had been invited to more dinners than there were days at her disposal in which to eat them; she had been called with something like public acclamation the belle of sundry theatre parties; her appearance and her clothes had been canvassed with distinctly overfree flattery in one or two newspapers; she had danced a little, made a number of calls, suffered more than was usual from headaches, and yawned a great deal. The women whom she met all seemed to take it for granted that she was in the seventh heaven of enjoyment; and the young men with huge expanses of shirt front, who sprang up everywhere in indefinite profusion about her, like the clumps of white double-hollyhocks in her garden at home, were evidently altogether sincere in their desire to please her. But the women all received the next comer with precisely the smile they gave her; and the young men, aside from their eagerness to devise and provide diversions for her, and the obvious honesty of their liking for her, were deadly commonplace. She was always glad when it was time to return to Thessaly. Yet in this same village she was practically secluded from the society of her own generation. There were not a few excellent families in Thessaly who were on calling and even dining terms with the Minsters, but there had never been many children in these purely native households, and now most of the grown-up sons had gone to seek fortune in the great cities, and most of the girls had married either men who lived elsewhere or men who did not quite come within the Minsters’ social pale.