"Oh, yes; it's well enough, though the decorations aren't to my taste; but the location is very unfashionable—orphan asylums, hovels, saloons, and all that under one's very nose."
"I hadn't noticed the saloons."
"Well, there's a saloon at any rate. I saw it to-day from one of the south windows. The state was stupidly short-sighted to buy a house in this quarter. The executive mansion ought to stand in Quality Row."
"What's that?" asked Bowers.
"Not much to look at—just a block or two of houses near the capitol, not one of which could have cost more than my own place in New Babylon, for all that famous people have lived in them; but it's the cream of Albany."
"Everything else is skim milk, I suppose?"
Mrs. Shelby eluded the classification.
"Nearly all that's socially significant is grouped thereabouts," she pursued; "the cathedral, the Beverwyck Club, Canon North, and Mrs. Teunis Van Dam. The canon and Mrs. Van Dam are the keys to the social citadel, I assure you. Probably you noticed them on the platform at the Inauguration. Then, she helped me receive this afternoon, thanks to a bit of diplomacy."
Bowers absorbed these esoteric deliverances in meekness.
"It takes a woman to bottom such things," he said admiringly. "I guess you'll pass."