Aileen, urgent, elemental, would have laughed at all this if she could have understood.

Not understanding, she felt diffident and uncertain of herself in certain presences.
Instance in this connection Mrs.Norrie Simms, who was a satellite of Mrs.Anson Merrill.

To be invited to the Anson Merrills' for tea, dinner, luncheon, or to be driven down-town by Mrs.Merrill, was paradise to Mrs.Simms.

She loved to recite the bon mots of her idol, to discourse upon her astonishing degree of culture, to narrate how people refused on occasion to believe that she was the wife of Anson Merrill, even though she herself declared it--those old chestnuts of the social world which must have had their origin in Egypt and Chaldea.
Mrs.Simms herself was of a nondescript type, not a real personage, clever, good-looking, tasteful, a social climber.

The two Simms children (little girls) had been taught all the social graces of the day--to pose, smirk, genuflect, and the like, to the immense delight of their elders.