"Such an experience!"
"What now?" said Victor. He was used to that phrase from the ardent and impressionable Selma. For her, with her wide-open eyes and ears, her vivid imagination and her thirsty mind, life was one closely packed series of adventures.
"I had an hour to spare," she proceeded to explain. "I thought it was a chance to further a little scheme I've got for marrying Jane Hastings and David Hull."
"Um!" said Victor with a quick change of expression—which, however, Selma happened not to observe.
"And," she went on, "I blundered into a luncheon party Jane was giving. You never saw—you never dreamed of such style—such dresses and dishes and flowers and hats! And I was sitting there with them, enjoying it all as if it were a circus or a ballet, when—Oh, Victor, what a silly, what a pitiful waste of time and money! So much to do in the world—so much that is thrillingly interesting and useful—and those intelligent young people dawdling there at nonsense a child would weary of! I had to run away. If I had stayed another minute I should have burst out crying—or denouncing them—or pleading with them to behave themselves."
"What else can they do?" said Victor. "They don't know any better. They've never been taught. How's the article?"
And he led the way up to the editorial room and held her to the subject of the article he had asked her to write. At the first opportunity she went back to the subject uppermost in her mind. Said she:
"I guess you're right—as usual. There's no hope for any people of that class. The busy ones are thinking only of making money for themselves, and the idle ones are too enfeebled by luxury to think at all. No, I'm afraid there's no hope for Hull—or for Jane either."
"I'm not sure about Miss Hastings," said Victor.
"You would have been if you'd seen her to-day," replied Selma. "Oh, she was lovely, Victor—really wonderful to look at. But so obviously the idler. And—body and soul she belongs to the upper class. She understands charity, but she doesn't understand justice, and never could understand it. I shall let her alone hereafter."