Anna, in fact, had discovered in her amiable and elegant mother-in-law an unexpected embodiment of the West Fifty-fifth Street ideal. Mrs. Summers and Madame de Chantelle, however strongly they would have disagreed as to the authorized source of Christian dogma, would have found themselves completely in accord on all the momentous minutiae of drawing-room conduct; yet Mr. Leath treated his mother’s foibles with a respect which Anna’s experience of him forbade her to attribute wholly to filial affection. In the early days, when she was still questioning the Sphinx instead of trying to find an answer to it, she ventured to tax her husband with his inconsistency. “You say your mother won’t like it if I call on that amusing little woman who came here the other day, and was let in by mistake; but Madame de Chantelle tells me she lives with her husband, and when mother refused to visit Kitty Mayne you said----” Mr. Leath’s smile arrested her. “My dear child, I don’t pretend to apply the principles of logic to my poor mother’s prejudices.” “But if you admit that they ARE prejudices----?” “There are prejudices and prejudices. My mother, of course, got hers from Monsieur de Chantelle, and they seem to me as much in their place in this house as the pot-pourri in your hawthorn jar. They preserve a social tradition of which I should be sorry to lose the least perfume. Of course I don’t expect you, just at first, to feel the difference, to see the nuance. In the case of little Madame de Vireville, for instance: you point out that she’s still under her husband’s roof. Very true; and if she were merely a Paris acquaintance--especially if you had met her, as one still might, in the RIGHT KIND of house in Paris--I should be the last to object to your visiting her. But in the country it’s different. Even the best provincial society is what you would call narrow: I don’t deny it; and if some of our friends met Madame de Vireville at Givre--well, it would produce a bad impression. You’re inclined to ridicule such considerations, but gradually you’ll come to see their importance; and meanwhile, do trust me when I ask you to be guided by my mother. It is always well for a stranger in an old society to err a little on the side of what you call its prejudices but I should rather describe as its traditions.”