Shortly before Selma Littleton took up her abode in New York, Miss Florence, or, as she was familiarly known, Miss Flossy Price, was an inhabitant of a New Jersey city.  Her father was a second cousin of Morton Price, whose family at that time was socially conspicuous in fashionable New York society.  Not aggressively conspicuous, as ultra fashionable people are to-day, by dint of frequent newspaper advertisement, but in consequence of elegant, conservative respectability, fortified by and cushioned on a huge income.  In the early seventies to know the Morton Prices was a social passport, and by no means every one socially ambitious knew them.  Morton Price’s great-grandfather had been a peddler, his grandfather a tea merchant, his father a tea merchant and bank organizer, and he himself did nothing mercantile, but was a director in diverse institutions, representing trusts or philantrophy, and was regarded by many, including himself, as the embodiment of ornamental and admirable citizenship.  He could talk by the hour on the degeneracy of state and city politics and the evil deeds of Congress, and was, generally speaking, a conservative, fastidious, well-dressed, well-fed man, who had a winning way with women and a happy faculty of looking wise and saying nothing rash in the presence of men.  Some of the younger generation were apt, with the lack of reverence belonging to youth, to speak of him covertly as “a stuffed club,” but no echo of this epithet had ever reached the ear of his cousin, David Price, in New Jersey.  For him, as for most of the world within a radius of two hundred miles, he was above criticism and a monument of social power.

David Price, Miss Flossy’s father, was the president of a small and unprogressive but eminently solid bank.  Respectable routine was his motto, and he lived up to it, and, as a consequence, no more sound institution of the kind existed in his neighborhood.  He and his directors were slow to adopt innovations of any kind; they put stumbling blocks in the path of business convenience whenever they could; in short, David Price in his humble way was a righteous, narrow, hide-bound retarder of progress and worshipper of established local custom.  Therefore it was a constant source of surprise and worry to him that he should have a progressive daughter.  There were four other children, patterns of quiet, plodding conservatism, but—­such is the irony of fate—­the youngest, prettiest, and his favorite, was an independent, opinionated young woman, who seemed to turn a deaf ear to paternal and maternal advice of safest New Jersey type.  In her father’s words, she had no reverence for any thing or any body, which was approximately true, for she did not hesitate to speak disrespectfully even of the head of the house in New York.

“Poppa,” she said one day, “Cousin Morton doesn’t care for any of us a little bit.  I know what you’re going to say,” she added; “that he sends you two turkeys every Thanksgiving.  The last were terribly tough.  I’m sure he thinks that we never see turkeys here in New Jersey, and that he considers us poor relations and that we live in a hole.  If one of us should call on him, I know it would distress him awfully.  He’s right in thinking that this is a hole.  Nothing ever happens here, and when I marry I intend to live in New York.”