[Pg 11]

"But, dear, you mustn't be offended. You know Mrs. Burke is very common and ignorant. She doesn't know the first thing about the world. She said to me the other day that she had often heard there were such things as class distinctions, but had never believed it until she came to Washington—she had thought it was like the fairy stories. She never was farther east than Chicago until this fall. She went there to the Fair. You must get her to tell you how she and three other women who belong to the same Chautauqua Circle went on together and slept in the same room and walked from dawn[Pg 12] till dark every day, catalogue in hand, for eleven days. It's too pathetic. She said, 'My! but my feet were sore. I thought I was a cripple for life.'"

[Pg 12]

"That sounds nice and friendly," said I, suspicious that Jessie's quaint sense of humor had not permitted her to appreciate Mrs. Burke. "I'm so dreadfully afraid I'll fall into the clutches of people that'll try to—to humiliate me."

Tears sprang to Jessie's eyes. "Please don't, Gus!" she pleaded. "They'll be only too deferential. And you must keep them so. I suspect that Mrs. Burke chums with her servants."

We were stopping before the house—the big, splendid Ralston Castle, as they call it; one of the very finest of the houses that have been building since rich men began to buy into the Senate and Cabinet and aspire for diplomatic places,[Pg 13] and so have attracted other rich families to Washington. What a changed Washington it is, and what a fight the old simplicity is making against the new ostentation! The sight of the Ralston Castle in my present circumstances depressed me horribly. I went to my second ball there, and it was given for me by Mrs. Ralston. And only a little more than a year ago I danced in the quadrille of honor with the French Ambassador—and the next week the Ralstons went smash and hurried abroad to hide, all except the old man who is hanging round Wall Street, they say, trying to get on his feet with the aid of his friends. Friends! How that word must burn into him every time he thinks of it. When he got into a tight place his "friends" took advantage of their knowledge of his affairs to grab his best securities, they[Pg 14] say. No doubt he was disagreeable in a way, but still those who turned on him the most savagely had been intimate with him and had accepted his hospitality.

[Pg 13]

[Pg 14]

"You'll be mistress 

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