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