"But what would you suggest then?"
"I suppose it is after all a question of what is in ourselves. A dozen literary clubs at which we read abstracts from encyclopedias wouldn't alter the fact that when we get together we have so little, so little to give to each other!"
"Oh, I don't know!" protested Myrtle. "We all read all the latest books and magazines and talk about them, and——"
At an adjoining table another phase of the agitating news was being threshed out.
"If she's what the papers say she is, I suppose she'll turn up her nose at New Munich," said the daughter of the Episcopal rector.
"Oh, I don't think she need put on any airs!" said Miss Ocksreider, the hostess's daughter. "I've visited down South and I can tell you we're enough more up to date here in New Munich. Nearly every one down there, even their aristocrats, is so poor that up here they wouldn't be anybody. It's awfully queer the way those Southerners don't care anything about appearances. They tell you right out they can't afford this and that, and they don't seem to think anything of wearing clothes all out of style. There was an awfully handsome new house in the town where I stopped, and when I asked the hotel clerk who lived in it and if they weren't great swells, he said: 'Oh, no, they are not in society; they're not one of our families, though they're very nice people, of course, members of church and good to the poor and all like that.' 'Not in society in a little town like this Leesburg, and living in a mansion like that?' I said. Yes, that's the way they are down there."
"How queer!" came from two of her table companions to whom, like herself, any but money standards of value were rather vague and hazy.
"But if they don't care for money down there, then what's this girl marrying Dan Leitzel for?" one of the men candidly wondered.
"Well, you know there's no accounting for tastes."
"I could excuse any woman's marrying for money—in these days it's only prudent," said the candid one; "but I certainly couldn't respect a woman that married Dan Leitzel for anything else."