"It doesn't matter," she said, "but I notice that you are all beginning to treat me like a sort of moral weathercock.

I wonder why ?" She gave no more thought to the matter which just for the most fleeting moment had rather piqued her, but sat drinking in the music of Mascagni's immortal opera entirely ignoring the fact that Palgrave's face was within an inch of her shoulder and that Alan Hosack, on her other side, was whispering heavy compliments.
Alice sat back and looked anxiously from the face of the girl who had been her closest friend at school to that of the man to whom she had given all her heart.

In spite of the fact that she had been married a year and had taken her place in the comparatively small set which made up New York society, Mrs.Palgrave was an optimist.

As a fiction-fed girl she had expected, with a thrill of excitement, that after marriage she would find herself in a whirlpool of careless and extravagant people who made their own elastic code of morals and played ducks and drakes with the Commandments.

She had accepted as a fact the novelist-playwright contention that society was synonymous with flippancy, selfishness and unchastity, and that the possession of money and leisure necessarily undermined all that was excellent in human nature.