"Well, for instance, the clerks employed in my office. I think they may perhaps club together and give us a handsome wedding-present if we send them cards. And if they do, I suppose their wives will feel privileged to call."
"And their wives are 'undesirable?' Yes, I suppose I see what you mean. How awfully narrow our lives are, aren't they? I imagine it might be a very broadening and interesting experience to really make friends with other classes than our own. I've never had the shadow of a chance to."
Daniel's glow of pride in realizing that he was marrying a woman whose aristocratic ignorance of other classes than her own was so absolute as to make her suppose naïvely that it might be "broadening and interesting" to know such, quite counteracted the disturbing effect of this absurd suggestion. He had only to remember his sisters' long struggle for recognition and their present precarious foothold in New Munich "society" to appreciate to the full the (to him) wonderful fact that his wife and all her "kin," as they called their relatives, "could have it to say" they had always been "at the top."
That such a wife might find his sisters "undesirable" did not occur to him, his sense of his sisters' crudities being dulled by familiarity with them, and his standard of value being so largely a financial one.
"When folks call on you in New Munich, Margaret," said Daniel, "Jennie and Sadie will be a great help to you in telling you whom of your callers you must cultivate and whom you must not."
"But aside from your employees and their wives there would be only your family's friends, of course?" Margaret asked, again puzzled.
"Well, some people prominent in our church, but not in society, and a few others, may bother us some. You need not worry about it; Jennie and Sadie will separate the sheep from the goats for you," he smiled.
"You have told me so little of your people. Your sisters live in New Munich?"
"I ought to have mentioned before this, dear, that my sisters keep house for me. They will continue to live with me."
"Oh!" Margaret's heart bounded with a great relief at this information, though even to her own secret consciousness it seemed disloyal to rejoice that she was not going to be thrown alone upon the society of Daniel Leitzel; the prospect had already begun to seem rather appalling.