“My dear, our suburb is trembling with excitement. The chief scion of all the McArdles is on the point of being Installed in Residence among us. I think it should be spoken of as at least an Installation, shouldn’t it? In our great Plutocracy, surely the McArdle dynasty is Royalty, isn’t it? Anyhow, you’d think so if you could see the excitement over the announcement that James Herbert McArdle, III, is coming here to represent the dynasty’s interests. That is, he’s supposed to be the new manager of the huge McArdle Works, which are the smallest, I believe, of the dozens of McArdle Works over the country. I understand he’s only to be nominal manager and is really to ‘learn the business’ under old Mr. Hiram Huston, the McArdles’ trusted ‘local representative.’ The youthful Dauphin is given command of an army—but under the advice of old generals strictly! However, you can guess what a spasm is happening here, with seventy million dollars (or is it seven hundred million?) walking around under one hat. I feel sorry for the poor agitated girls and their poor agitating mothers. The rich marry the rich; _we_ sha’n’t get him!” She looked up thoughtfully at the mirror, frowned in sharp disapproval—not of the mirror—and continued: “It’s really disgusting, the manœuvring to be the first to meet and annex him. Eleanor Gray and her mother are accused of having gone to New York to try to be on the same train with him! Yesterday there was a rumour that he had arrived at the Jefferson Road Inn, which is to be his temporary quarters, and the story went all round that Harriet Joyce thought she recognized him there at tea and actually fainted away in order to make him notice her. My dear, I _believe_ it! Really, you simply couldn’t imagine the things that are going on. As for me, it is the piteous truth that this stupendous advent fails to stir me. I wish it could! But no, upon my life, I haven’t a flicker—not the faintest flicker of ordinary human curiosity to know even if he looks like his tiresome pictures. These curiosities, these stirrings are for the springtime of life, my dear, while I—as I told poor Henry last night—I am autumn!”