account of those people. He gave their natural history reality by
drawing upon his own; he reconstructed their plebeian past from the
experiences of his childhood and his youth of the pre-Parisian period;
and he had a pang of suicidal joy in insulting their ignorance of the
world.

"What different kinds of people you meet!" said the girl at last, with an
envious sigh. Her reading had enlarged the bounds of her imagination,
if not her knowledge; the novels nowadays dealt so much with very common
people, and made them seem so very much more worth while than the people
one met.

She said something like this to Beaton. He answered: "You can meet the
people I'm talking of very easily, if you want to take the trouble.
It's what they came to New York for. I fancy it's the great ambition of
their lives to be met."

"Oh yes," said Miss Vance, fashionably, and looked down; then she looked
up and said, intellectually: "Don't you think it's a great pity? How
much better for them to have stayed where they were and what they were!"

"Then you could never have had any chance of meeting them," said Beaton.
"I don't suppose you intend to go out to the gas country?"

"No," said Miss Vance, amused. "Not that I shouldn't like to go."

"What a daring spirit! You ought to be on the staff of 'Every Other
Week,'" said Beaton.

"The staff-Every Other Week? What is it?"