“The truth is no harm.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we should happen to become friends?  We are the pioneers in this block, but I hear three other houses have been sold.  I suppose you own your house?”

“I believe not.  We have a lease of it.”

“That’s a pity, because Gregory bought ours on a mortgage, thinking the land is sure to become more valuable.  He hopes to be able to sell some day for a great deal more than he paid for it.  May I ask where you lived before you were married?”

Selma told her briefly.

“Then you are almost Western.  I felt sure you weren’t a New Yorker, and I didn’t think you were from Boston.  You have the Boston earnest expression, but somehow you’re different.  You don’t mind my analyzing you, do you?  That’s a Boston habit by the way.  But I’m not from Boston.  I’ve lived all my life in New Jersey.  So we are both strangers in New York.  That is, I’m the same as a stranger, though my father is a cousin of the Morton Prices.  We sent them wedding cards and they called one day when I was out.  I shall return the call and find them out, and that will be the last move on either side until Gregory does something remarkable.  I’m rather glad I wasn’t at home, because it would have been awkward.  They wouldn’t have known what to say to me, and they might have felt that they ought to ask me to dinner, and I don’t care to have them ask me until they’re obliged to.  Do I shock you running on so about my own affairs?” Flossy asked, noticing Selma draw herself up sternly.

“Oh no, I like that.  I was only thinking that it was very strange of your cousins.  You are as good as they, aren’t you?”

“Mercy, no.  We both know it, and that’s what makes the situation so awkward.  As Christians, they had to call on me, but I really think they are justified in stopping there.  Socially I’m nobody.”

“In this country we are all free and equal.”

“You’re a dear—­a delicious dear,” retorted Flossy, with a caressing laugh.  “There’s something of the sort in the Declaration of Independence, but, as Gregory says, that was put in as a bluff to console salesladies.  Was everybody equal in Benham, Mrs. Littleton?”

“Practically so,” said Selma, with an air of haughtiness, which was evoked by her recollection of the group of houses on Benham’s River Drive into which she had never been invited.  “There were some people who were richer than others, but that didn’t make them better than any one else.”

“Well, in New York it’s different.  Of course, every body has the same right to vote or to be elected President of the United States, but equality ends there.  People here are either in society or out of it, and society itself is divided into sets.  There’s the conservative aristocratic set, the smart rapid set, the set which hasn’t much money, but has Knickerbocker or other highly respectable ancestors, the new millionaire set, the literary set, the intellectual philanthropic set, and so on, according to one’s means or tastes.  Each has its little circle which shades away into the others, and every now and then there is a big entertainment to which they all go.”