"Changed! What should change me?"
"The world."
"What nonsense!" cried May, with her old schoolgirl bluntness. "As if I had not been living in the world all my life!"
Mr. Rivers raised his eyebrows with an amused smile.
"Well, isn't it nonsense," pursued May, "to talk as if a few hundred or thousand persons in one town—though that town is London—made up the world?"
"It is a phrase which every one uses, and every one understands."
"But every one does not understand it alike."
"Perhaps not."
"What did you mean by it, just now?"
"What could I mean but the world of fashion, the world par excellence? Rightly so-called, no doubt, since it affords the best field for the exercise of the higher and nobler human faculties. Those who are not in it exist, indeed; but with a half-developed, inferior kind of life, like a jelly-fish."