"I should think I was!" said Arlee Beecher very indignantly. "The very notion—! Captain Kerissen is a very nice young man. He is going to get me an invitation to the Khedive's ball."
"Is that a very crumby affair?"
"Crumby? It's simply gorgeous! Everyone is mad over it. Most tourists simply read about it, and it is too perfect luck to be invited! Only the English who have been presented at court are invited and there's a girl at the Savoy Hotel I've met—Lady Claire Montfort—who wasn't presented because she was in mourning for her grandmother last year, and she is simply furious about it. An old dowager here said that there ought to be similar distinctions among the Americans—that only those who had been presented at the White House ought to be recognized. Fancy making the White House a social distinction!" laughed the daughter of the Great Republic.
"I wonder," said Billy, "if I met a nice Turkish lady, whether she would get me an invitation? Then we could have another waltz——"
"There aren't any Turkish ladies there," uttered Miss Beecher rebukingly. "Don't you know that? When they are on the Continent—those that are ever taken there—they may go to dances and things, but here they can't, although some of them are just as modern as you or I, I've heard, and lots more educated."
"You speak," he protested, "from a superficial acquaintance with my academic accomplishments."
"Are you so very—proficient?"
"I was—I am Phi Beta Kappa," he sadly confessed.
Her laugh rippled out. "You don't look it," she cheered.
"Oh, no, I don't look it," he complacently agreed. "That's the lamp in the gloom. But I am. I couldn't help it. I was curious about things and I studied about them and faculties pressed honors upon me. I am even here upon a semi-learned errand. I wanted to have a look at the diggings a friend of mine is making at Thebes and several looks at the dam at Assouan, for I am by way of being an engineer myself—a beginning engineer."