IN THE BEST SOCIETY


Grant's electric had swung in at the end of the long line of
carriages of all kinds, from coach of ambassador and costly
limousine of multi-millionaire to humble herdic wherein poor,
official grandee's wife and daughter were feeling almost as common
as if they had come in a street car or afoot. Josh Craig, leaning
from the open window, could see the grand entrance under the wide
and lofty porte-cochere--the women, swathed in silk and fur,
descending from the carriages and entering the wide-flung doors of
the vestibule; liveries, flowers, lights, sounds of stringed
instruments, intoxicating glimpses of magnificence at windows,
high and low. And now the electric was at the door. He and
Arkwright sprang out, hastened up the broad steps. His expression
amused Arkwright; it was intensely self-conscious, resolutely
indifferent--the kind of look that betrays tempestuous inward
perturbations and misgivings. "Josh is a good deal of a snob, for
all his brave talk," thought he. "But," he went on to reflect,
"that's only human. We're all impressed by externals, no matter
what we may pretend to ourselves and to others. I've been used to
this sort of thing all my life and I know how little there is in
it, yet I'm in much the same state of bedazzlement as Josh."

Josh had a way of answering people's thoughts direct which
Arkwright sometimes suspected was not altogether accidental. He
now said: "But there's a difference between your point of view and
mine. You take this seriously through and through. I laugh at it
in the bottom of my heart, and size it up at its true value. I'm
like a child that don't really believe in goblins, yet likes the