Lee shook her head, smiling. In spite of the persistent depression within her, she found her new friends very interesting.
“Twenty-four, not married, and only sixty pounds a year to dress on! Isn’t it a tragedy? I wish I were an American. They’re all so frightfully rich. At least, all those are that come over here; they wouldn’t dare to come if they weren’t.”
“I have dared, and I am not—not as you count riches.”
“No—really now? But of course you’re joking, Cecil Maundrell simply had to marry a ton——”
Lee laughed, with a nearer approach to hysteria than she had ever known. “Would you mind not talking about that?” she said. “If ever I know you as well as I hope I shall, I’ll tell you why.”
“Fancy my being so rude! But I’m quite horribly outspoken, and Cecil Maundrell’s so good-looking, of course he’s been discussed threadbare. Of course we all knew the Abbey must go to another American, and we’ve been so anxious to see you. Emmy is a duck, but she’s not a beauty—few Americans really are, to my mind. They just ‘chic it’ as the French painters say. Everybody is simply staring at you, and you’re so used to it, you don’t appear to see them. You’re going to be a great success. I know all the signs—seen ’em too often!”
“Well, I hope so. I suppose an American failure would be painfully conspicuous.”
“Oh, wouldn’t she! Tell me, is it really true that you have different grades of society, as we have—an upper and middle-class, and all that sort of thing? Some of the Americans over here have always turned up their noses at Emmy, and it seems so very odd—you are only a day or two old; how can you have so many distinctions? Of course I know that some are rich and some are poor, which means that some are educated and some are not, but I should think that would make just two classes. But Emmy is—has been—awfully rich, and yet she has had a hard fight with two or three other Americans that are dead against her. She hasn’t it in her, poor little soul, to be quite as smart as Lady Vernon Spencer and Mrs. Almeric Sturt—you could be!—but she’s ‘popular,’ and unless the Abbey burns down—oh, it’s the sweetest thing in England, and the shootings are famous! But do explain to me.”
“About our social differences? Of course to be really anybody you must have come from the South, one way or another.”
“What South?—South America?”