“What difference does that make?”

“All the difference....  Now, Cally, don’t pick up any of poor Henrietta’s equality notions, just because you feel a little blue at present.  This is going to come out all right.  You may trust me.”

“I do,” said Cally, sincerely.

After a silence she added with a laugh:  “Who are the best people, mamma?”

“I am, for one,” said mamma; and unconsciously her grasp lightened on the little ornamental bag where snuggled her Settlement check for Ten Thousand Dollars, securely bagged at last.

“Don’t let any poor nobodies pull you down to their level with their talk about merit,” said mamma.  “What’s merit in society?”

     XXIV

How the Best People came to the Old Hotel again; how Cally is Ornamental, maybe, but hardly a Useful Person; how she encounters Three Surprises from Three Various Men, all disagreeable but the Last.

To the Dabney House, it was like old times come back.  Not in forty years had the ancient hostelry so resounded with the steps of the best people.  Without, there stood lines of motor-cars in the shabby and unaccustomed street, ten times as many as there had been in May.  Within—­to prove at a stroke the tone of the gathering—­J.  Forsythe Avery himself stood conspicuously at the very door:  not merely stood, but labored behind a deal table for the cause, distributing Settlement pamphlets, brochures or treatises, to all comers.  He irresistibly reminded Carlisle of one of those lordly men in gold-lace outside a painless dentist’s parlors.  Many others of the conquering order there were observed also, almost in the first glance; chiefly congregating in the new assembly room, where the “opening reception” was under way, but also deploying in numbers all over the lower floor and the remodeled basement beneath.

It was the Heths’ first public appearance since their home-coming, and perhaps even mamma felt a little bit self-conscious.  But Carlisle had come with serious intentions, and a manner of determined vivacity.  Let people find anything to gloat over in her appearance, if they could.  Glancing about as they left Mr. Avery, she saw that the old court or lobby, where she had stood and talked once on a rainy May day, had been left intact, only renovated somewhat as to floor and walls.  On one side of it now ran down a row of offices with new glass doors, the first of them, marked “Mr. Pond.”  On the other side, a great arched doorway led into the large meeting-room, formed by the demolition of many partitions.  Changed indeed it all was:  yet Cally found it quite disturbingly familiar too....