escaping him, for he said, "I don't think it's wise to go too much with these people. They're not our sort. . . . I've heard stories of how they live. They're society people."
At which Ellen mocked him, laughing, to say, "But I have nothing to do with them. I work for them. I entertain them . . . that's all."
"And Wyck says that young Callendar has a reputation for being a bad one."
Ellen laughed again, scornfully. "How does he know anything about young Callendar? Wyck and his boarding house. It's because he hates me. I know what he's like . . . a mean, nasty little man who hates me."
"He has friends. . . . His family was rich once in New York."
What Clarence said was true. Wyck did know because, although he had long since ceased to have any existence for such people as the Callendars, there were channels by way of housemaids and distant relatives through which news of their world penetrated at last, somewhat distorted and magnified, to the spinster aunts in Yonkers, and so at length to Mr. Wyck himself. For the old ladies had known young Callendar's father as a boy and they still lived in the world of those early days when, ensconced on lower Fifth Avenue behind plush curtains ornamented with ball fringe, they had received the Sunday procession of fashionables. The vulgar, new city of this early twentieth century, for all its noise and show, did not exist for them any more than they, for all their thin blooded pride, existed for the Callendars. It was after all an affair merely of dollars and cents. The Callendars had increased their fortune; the Wycks had lost theirs.
"I shall go to the Callendars' and play for them because it is necessary," said Ellen. "I am not a fool. I can take care of myself."
To this abrupt statement, Clarence found no answer. He yielded quietly and, presently, on the nights when Ellen played in the great house on Murray Hill, he found himself going back once more to his three lodges and the Mutual Benefit Association
