"Don't tell me that you are interested in that cheap skate. Alexina Groome! You!" "He's not a cheap skate. I despise your cheap slang." "He's a rank nobody." "You mean he isn't rich. Or his family didn't belong. What do you suppose I care? I'm not a snob." "He is. A climbing, ingenuous, empty-headed snob." "You are a snob. You ought to be ashamed of yourself." "I've a right to be a snob if I choose, and he hasn't. My snobbery is the right sort: the 'I will maintain' kind. He'd give all the hair on his head to have the right to that sort of snobbery. His is" (she chanted in a high light maddening voice): "Oh, God, let me climb. Yank me up into the paradise of San Francisco society. Burlingame, Alta, Menlo Park, Atherton, Belvidere, San Rafael. Oh, God, it's awful to be a nobody, not to be in the same class with these rich fellers, not to belong to the Pacific-Union Club, not to have polo ponies, not to belong to smart golf clubs, to the Burlingame Club. Not to get clothes from New York and London--" "You keep quiet," shrieked Alexina, who with difficulty refrained from substituting: "You shut up." She flung off Aileen's hands. "What do you know about him? He doesn't like you." "Never had a chance to find out." "What can you know about him, then?" "Think I'm blind? Think I'm deaf? Don't I know everything that goes on in this town? Isn't sizing-up my long suit? And he's as dull as--as a fish without salt. I sat next to him at a dinner, and all he could talk about was the people he'd met--our sort, of course. And he was dull even at that. He's all manners and bluff--" "You couldn't draw him out. He talked to me." "What about? I'm really interested to know. Everybody says the same thing. They fall for his dancing and manners, and--well, yes--I 'll admit it--for his looks. He even looks like a gentleman. But all the girls say he bores 'em stiff. They have to talk their heads off. What did he say to you that was so frantically interesting?" "Well, of course--we danced most of the time." "That's just it. He's inherited the shell of some able old ancestor and not a bit of the skull furniture. Nature often plays tricks like that. But I could forgive him for being dull if he weren't such a damn snob." "You shan't call him names. If he wants to be one of us, and life was so unkind as to--to--well, birth him on the outside, I'm sure that's no crime." "Snobbery," said Miss Thorndyke, who was intellectual at the moment and cultivating the phrase, "is merely a rather ingenuous form of aspiration. I can't see that it varies except in kind from other forms of ambition. And without ambition there would be no progress."