The Colonel was not very clear-headed, and he thought, naturally enough, that the party was his own suggestion, because his remark led to the first starting of the idea.  He entered into the plan, therefore, with a feeling of pride as well as pleasure, and the great project was resolved upon in a family council without a dissentient voice.  This was the party, then, to which Mr. Bernard was going.  The town had been full of it for a week.  “Everybody was asked.”  So everybody said that was invited.  But how in respect of those who were not asked?  If it had been one of the old mansion-houses that was giving a party, the boundary between the favored and the slighted families would have been known pretty well beforehand, and there would have been no great amount of grumbling.  But the Colonel, for all his title, had a forest of poor relations and a brushwood swamp of shabby friends, for he had scrambled up to fortune, and now the time was come when he must define his new social position.

This is always an awkward business in town or country.  An exclusive alliance between two powers is often the same thing as a declaration of war against a third.  Rockland was soon split into a triumphant minority, invited to Mrs. Sprowle’s party, and a great majority, uninvited, of which the fraction just on the border line between recognized “gentility” and the level of the ungloved masses was in an active state of excitement and indignation.

“Who is she, I should like to know?” said Mrs. Saymore, the tailor’s wife.  “There was plenty of folks in Rockland as good as ever Sally Jordan was, if she had managed to pick up a merchant.  Other folks could have married merchants, if their families was n’t as wealthy as them old skinflints that willed her their money,” etc., etc.  Mrs. Saymore expressed the feeling of many beside herself.  She had, however, a special right to be proud of the name she bore.  Her husband was own cousin to the Saymores of Freestone Avenue (who write the name Seymour, and claim to be of the Duke of Somerset’s family, showing a clear descent from the Protector to Edward Seymour, (1630,)—­then a jump that would break a herald’s neck to one Seth Saymore,(1783,)—­from whom to the head of the present family the line is clear again).  Mrs. Saymore, the tailor’s wife, was not invited, because her husband mended clothes.  If he had confined himself strictly to making them, it would have put a different face upon the matter.

The landlord of the Mountain House and his lady were invited to Mrs. Sprowle’s party.  Not so the landlord of Pollard’s Tahvern and his lady.  Whereupon the latter vowed that they would have a party at their house too, and made arrangements for a dance of twenty or thirty couples, to be followed by an entertainment.  Tickets to this “Social Ball” were soon circulated, and, being accessible to all at a moderate price, admission to the “Elegant Supper” included, this second festival promised to be as merry, if not as select, as the great party.