type, perfectly satisfied to spend her whole life in acquiring
things essentially invaluable, and to use a naturally shrewd and
quick intelligence in copying fashions of all sorts, small and
large, as fast as advanced merchants and magazines presented them to
her. She was one of the great army of women who help to send the
sale of an immoral book well up into the hundreds of thousands; she
liked to spend long afternoons with a box of chocolates and a book
unfit for the touch of any woman; a book that she would review for
the benefit of her friends later, with a shocked wonder that "they
dare print such things!" She liked to tell a man's story, and the
other women could not but laugh at her, for she was undeniably good
company, and nobody ever questioned the taste of anything she ever
said or did. She was a famous gossip, for like all women, she found
the private affairs of other people full of fascination, and, having
no legitimate occupation, she was always at liberty to discuss them.

Yet Mrs. White was not at all an unusual woman, and, like her
associates, she tacitly assumed herself to be the very flower of
American womanhood. She quoted her distinguished relatives on all
occasions, the White family, in all its ramifications, supplied the
correct precedent for all the world; there was no social emergency
to which some cousin or aunt of Mrs. White's had not been more than
equal. Having no children of her own, she still could silence and
shame many a good mother with references to Cousin Ethel
Langstroth's "kiddies", or to Aunt Grace Thurston's wonderful
governess.

Personally, Mrs. White vaguely felt that there was something
innately indecent about children anyway, the smaller they were the
less mentionable she found them. The little emergencies, of nose-