apartment--a flat is when it's less than a hundred a month and only has
one bathroom), and set up for bachelor girls. The younger pair did
society for a while, and poor Mrs. Townley chaperoned round after them,
as befitted her duty and position, and had gorgeous Worth gowns, all lace
and jets, that I do believe shortened her breath, until one night in a
slippery music-room she walked up the back of a polar bear rug, fell off
his head, and had an awful coast on the floor, that racked her knee so
that she could stay at home without causing remark, which she cheerfully
did. The two youngest girls were pretty, but they were snobs, and carried
their money on their sleeves in such plain sight that they were too
suspicious, and seemed to expect every man that said 'good evening' was
waiting to grab it. So they weren't popular, and started off for Europe
to study art and music. Of course when they came back they had a lot of
lingo about the art atmosphere and all that; home was a misfit and
impossible, so they went to live in a swell studio with two maids and a
Jap butler in costume, and do really give bang-up musicals, with paid
talent of course. I went to one.

"That left Georgie, the odd one, who was the eldest, with poor Mrs.
Townley. By this time the old lady was kind of broken-spirited, and
worried a good deal as to why all her girls left her,--'she'd always
tried to do her duty,'--and all that. This discouraged Georgie; she got
blue and nervous, had indigestion, and, mistaking it for religion,
vamoosed into a high-church retreat. And I call it mighty hard lines for
the old lady."

I thought "too much money," but I didn't say it, for this brutally direct
but well-meaning woman could not imagine such a thing, and she continued:
"Yet Mrs. Townley had a soft snap compared to some, for she was in the
right set at the start, with both feet well up on the ladder, and didn't