is one of the most astounding things in American life!"
"That's so," replied Crane. "It is said that one-half the world doesn't know how the other half lives, but in these United States about nine-tenths of the society people have no more notion how their grandparents lived than they have of life on Mars or Saturn. I went to a wedding the other day. It was magnificent beyond words. The two young people had been brought up in"
"Barbaric luxury," Thorndyke interrupted. "It's barbarous to bring children up as those two were—I know whom you mean. The girl had her own suite of rooms almost from her birth, her own maid, her own trap. Even when there was an affectation of simplicity it cost enough to have swamped her grandfather's general store at Meekins's Cross Roads, where he laid the foundation of his fortune. When she came out in society it simply meant more of everything. No daughter of the Cæsars was ever more conscious of the gulf between her and the common people—I say common people with the deepest respect for the term—than this girl is conscious of the gulf between herself and the class to
