could forgive him for being dull if he weren't such a damn snob."

"You shan't call him names. If he wants to be one of us, and life was
so unkind as to--to--well, birth him on the outside, I'm sure that's no
crime."

"Snobbery," said Miss Thorndyke, who was intellectual at the moment and
cultivating the phrase, "is merely a rather ingenuous form of aspiration. I
can't see that it varies except in kind from other forms of ambition. And
without ambition there would be no progress."

"Oh, can it," sneered Judge Lawton's daughter. "You're all wrong, anyhow.
Snobbery leads to the rocks much oftener than to high achievement. I've
heard dad say so, and you won't venture to assert that _he_ doesn't
know. It bears about the same relation to progress that grafting does to
legitimate profits. Anyhow, it makes me sick, and I'm not going to have
Alex falling in love with a poor fish--"

"Fish?" Alexina's voice rose above a fresh detonation, "You dare--and you
think I'm going to ask you whom I shall fall in love with? Fish? What do
you call those other shrimps who don't think of anything but drinking and
sport, whether they attend to business or not?--their fathers make them,
anyhow. And you want to marry one of them! They're fish, if you like."

The two girls were glaring at each other. Gray eyes were blazing, green
eyes snapping. Two sets of white even teeth were bared. They looked like a
couple of belligerent puppies. Another moment and they would have forgotten
the sacred traditions of their class and flown at each other's hair. But
Miss Bascom interposed. Even the loss of her uninsured million did not
ruffle her, for she had another in Government and railroad bonds, and full