As the residential area unfolded itself, he named the owners of many of the houses they were passing, while Mrs. Blair summarized their history in short, amusing phrases. Wayne, sitting on the front seat, turned his head to throw in a word now and then; but for the greater part he kept his own counsel. He overheard his sister’s rapid survey of the social geography of the Greater City. She declared that there was no debating the claims of the East End to social supremacy, though there were what she called “nice people” in the red brick homes of transpontine Allegheny. “Dick Wingfield,” she quoted, “always says that in crossing the river, Charon and not the bridge company gets the fee. Dick calls the river the Stygian wave.” Mrs. Blair was not sure that Mrs. Craighill quite took this in, but it did not matter in one who smiled responsively at everything and appeared anxious to please. There was the usual difficulty in explaining to a stranger the triangular shape of the city clasped by its two rivers that so quickly flow as one, and the fact that you may, if you like, take a boat here for New Orleans if you are bent upon adventure. “Are there suburbs?” Mrs. Craighill asked; and rising to this prompting Mrs. Blair flashed an illuminating glance upon Stanwixley, where, she conceded, there were delightful people, but why they should live where they did was beyond her powers of understanding. Colonel Craighill protested now and then, but smilingly, as one who would, at the fitting moment, pronounce the final word in all such matters. Greater philosophers than Fanny Blair have found it difficult to hit off in a few phrases the social alignments of the Greater City. Where there is no centre, no common and unifying social expression, it is not easy to find a point of departure. Even the _terra sancta_ of the East End presents no stern walls to the newcomer who can provide himself with a house and a chef. And it is not correct to speak of social strata in the City of the Iron Heart, for the term implies depth, and the life here at this period was wholly superficial, a thing of geography and cliques, the one fairly rigid, the other unstable and shifting. But these were the Years of the Great Prosperity, a time of broad social readjustments and generous inclusion. Poverty alone, we may say, enforces the rules of exact social differentiation; there has never been in America any society so scrupulous, proud and sensitive as that of the Southern cavaliers when they threw off their armour and returned to their despoiled estates.