"What grounds had you for such an assumption?"
"Really, Selma, your catechism is most extraordinary. Excuse my smiling. And I don't know how to answer your questions—your fierce questions any better. I didn't ask you to my party because I supposed that you and your husband were not interested in that sort of thing, and would not know any of the people. You have often told me that you thought they were frivolous."
"I consider them so still."
"Then why do you complain?"
"Because—because you have not acted like a friend. Your idea of friendship has been to pour into my ears, day after day, how you had been asked to dinner by this person and taken up by that person, until I was weary of the sound of your voice, but it seems not to have occurred to you, as a friend of mine, and a friend and admirer of my husband, to introduce us to people whom you were eager to know, and who might have helped him in his profession. And now, after turning the cold shoulder on us, and omitting us from your party, because you assumed I didn't dance, you have come here this morning, in the name of friendship, to tell me that your cousins, at last, have invited you to dinner. And yet you think it strange that I'm not interested. That's the only reason you came—to let me know that you are a somebody now; and you expected me, as a friend and a nobody, to tell you how glad I am."
Flossy's eyes opened wide. Free as she was accustomed to be in her own utterances, this flow of bitter speech delivered with seer-like intensity was a new experience to her. She did not know whether to be angry or amused by the indictment, which caused her to wince notwithstanding that she deemed it slander. Moreover the insinuation that she had been a bore was humiliating.
"I shall not weary you soon again with my confidences," she answered. "So it appears that you were envious of me all the time—that while you were preaching to me that fashionable society was hollow and un-American, you were secretly unhappy because you couldn't do what I was doing—because you weren't invited, too. Oh, I see it all now; it's clear as daylight. I've suspected the truth for some time, but I've refused to credit it. Now everything is explained. I took you at your word; I believed in you and your husband and looked up to you as literary people—people who were interested in fine and ennobling things. I admired you for the very reason that I thought you didn't care, and that you didn't need to care, about society and fashionable position. I kept saying to you that I envied you your tastes, and let you see that I considered myself your real inferior in my determination to attract attention and oblige society to notice us. I was guileless and simpleton enough to tell you of my progress—things I would have blushed to tell another woman like myself—because I considered you the embodiment of high aims and spiritual ideas, as far superior to mine as the poetic star is superior to the garish electric light. I thought it might amuse you to listen to my vanities. Instead, it seems you were masquerading and were eating your heart out with envy of me—poor me. You were ambitious to be like me."
"I wouldn't be like you for anything in the world."
"You couldn't if you tried. That's one of the things which this extraordinary interview has made plain beyond the shadow of a doubt. You are aching to be a social success. You are not fit to be. I have found that out for certain to-day."
"It is false," exclaimed Selma, with a tragic intonation. "You do not understand. I have no wish to be a social success. I should abhor to spend my life after the manner of you and your associates. What I object to, what I complain of, is that, in spite of your fine words and pretended admiration of me, you have preferred these people, who are exclusive without a shadow of right, to me who was your friend, and that you have chosen to ignore me for the sake of them, and behaved as if you thought I was not their equal or your equal. That is not friendship, it is snobbishness—un-American snobbishness."