A young woman, dressed in white cambric, with the deep shade of a magnolia grove cast upon her as she sat on the marble steps of an Oriental garden, read of these brilliant festivities in various English journals whose office it is to chronicle such matters; and as she read she frowned, and as she frowned she sighed. “Oh, the waste, the folly, the disgrace!” she murmured as she pushed the newspapers away from her. For she had peculiar views of her own, and had little or nothing in common with her generation or with her procreators. She looked very like her bust by Dalou as she thrust the offending journals off her lap. “I am a _déclassée_,” she said to herself as she sat amongst the rhododendrons and the monkeys. “All they have spent on me cannot make me anything more. They should have left me in the place which they occupied when I was born. I would sooner go out as a common servant any day than be forced to witness their ignominy and live in their suffocating wealth, to see the laugh in the eyes of the people they toady, and overhear the ridicule of those who crowd to their supper-table. If he would only disown me--cut me off with a shilling!” “What’s the matter, my dear? Bad news from England? Parents ill?” said a mellow and cheerful voice, as the temporary owner of terrace and magnolia grove, Lord Framlingham, came out of the house and across the rough grass, accompanied by his two inseparable companions, his cigarette and his skye-terrier. She picked up one of the newspapers and pointed to a paragraph in it. “They must be the laugh of London!” “Oh, my dear, you don’t know London,” said her host as he read. “They will be the idols of London, the very Buddha of solid gold that its smart people most delight to adore. Look at the whole thing as a comedy, my child, and you will enjoy it.” “I once spoke to a clown’s wife at a circus,” said Katherine Massarene. “While the clown was making the audience scream with laughter, she was crying. ‘I can’t help crying,’ she said, ‘to see my man make a butt and a guy of himself. He’s nabbut a tomfool to them, but he’s my man to me.’ I am as foolish as the clown’s wife.” “I can’t admit the analogy,” said her host. “I think you take the thing too seriously. Your people’s position is a common one enough in our days. When anybody has made a heap of money they are never happy till they get a mob of smart beggars to crowd round ’em and pick their pockets. How would smart society go on unless there were these feeders for it to fatten on? If I were your father I should keep my money in my pocket and snap my fingers at smart society. But then, you see, I know what smart society is and he doesn’t.” “But why should he want to know? He is not made for it. It only laughs at him.” “Oh, pardon me, I am sure it does more than laugh; I am sure it plunders him as well. I only hope that he will know when to cry ‘stop, thief!’ for if he doesn’t all his millions will go into the maw of his fine friends.”