“I shall not weary you soon again with my confidences,” she answered.  “So it appears that you were envious of me all the time—­that while you were preaching to me that fashionable society was hollow and un-American, you were secretly unhappy because you couldn’t do what I was doing—­because you weren’t invited, too.  Oh, I see it all now; it’s clear as daylight.  I’ve suspected the truth for some time, but I’ve refused to credit it.  Now everything is explained.  I took you at your word; I believed in you and your husband and looked up to you as literary people—­people who were interested in fine and ennobling things.  I admired you for the very reason that I thought you didn’t care, and that you didn’t need to care, about society and fashionable position.  I kept saying to you that I envied you your tastes, and let you see that I considered myself your real inferior in my determination to attract attention and oblige society to notice us.  I was guileless and simpleton enough to tell you of my progress—­things I would have blushed to tell another woman like myself—­because I considered you the embodiment of high aims and spiritual ideas, as far superior to mine as the poetic star is superior to the garish electric light.  I thought it might amuse you to listen to my vanities.  Instead, it seems you were masquerading and were eating your heart out with envy of me—­poor me.  You were ambitious to be like me.”

“I wouldn’t be like you for anything in the world.”

“You couldn’t if you tried.  That’s one of the things which this extraordinary interview has made plain beyond the shadow of a doubt.  You are aching to be a social success.  You are not fit to be.  I have found that out for certain to-day.”

“It is false,” exclaimed Selma, with a tragic intonation.  “You do not understand.  I have no wish to be a social success.  I should abhor to spend my life after the manner of you and your associates.  What I object to, what I complain of, is that, in spite of your fine words and pretended admiration of me, you have preferred these people, who are exclusive without a shadow of right, to me who was your friend, and that you have chosen to ignore me for the sake of them, and behaved as if you thought I was not their equal or your equal.  That is not friendship, it is snobbishness—­un-American snobbishness.”

“It is very amusing.  Amusing yet depressing,” continued Flossy, without heed to this asseveration.  “You have proved one of my ideals to be a delusion, which is sad.”  She had arisen and stood gently swaying pendent by its crook her gay parasol, with her head on one side, and seeming for once to be choosing her words judicially.  “When we met first and I nearly rushed into your arms, I was fascinated, and I said to myself that here was the sort of American woman of whom I had dreamed—­the sort of woman I had fondly imagined once that I might become.  I saw you were unsophisticated and different from the conventional women to whom I was accustomed,