to justify them in looking higher socially--in looking
among the very rich and really fashionable. In the
Hanging Rock sort of community, having all the
snobbishness of Fifth Avenue, Back Bay, and Rittenhouse
Square, with the added torment of the snobbishness
being perpetually ungratified--in such communities,
beneath a surface reeking culture and idealistic folderol,
there is a coarse and brutal materialism, a passion for
money, for luxury, for display, that equals aristocratic
societies at their worst. No one can live for a winter,
much less grow up, in such a place without becoming
saturated with sycophantry. Thus, only by some
impossible combination of chances could there have been
at Hanging Rock a young man who would have
appreciated Mildred and have had the courage of
his appreciation. This combination did not happen.
In Mildred's generation and set there were only the
two classes of men noted above. The men of the one
of them which could not have attracted her accepted
their fate of mating with second-choice females to whom
they were themselves second choice. The men of the
other class rarely appeared at Hanging Rock functions,
hung about the rich people in New York, Newport,
and on Long Island, and would as soon have thought
of taking a Hanging Rock society girl to wife as of
exchanging hundred-dollar bills for twenty-five-cent
pieces. Having attractions acceptable in the best
markets, they took them there. Hanging Rock
denounced them as snobs, for Hanging Rock was
virtuously eloquent on the subject of snobbishness--we