Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/47

 with refined features, and the look which causes a young woman of her class to be called "very superior." "That's partly it," Kate admitted. "But I can't make up my mind. Edward is awfully good looking, and I can't help liking him, but there s another thing I can't help, too. I can't help thinking it's silly to like him, and that he ain't the sort of match for me now. I could do a lot better, if I liked, and I tell him so frankly. Why, he'd never have dared to pop the question to Liane, and he wouldn't to me, if I'd come to the house as her ladyship's maid. He'd have felt the difference between us then just as he would with Liane, even if he'd happened to have fancied her, which of course he never did. It's just because I was parlour-maid when we first got to know each other that makes him feel himself on an equality."

"Well, there's something I can't help thinking," said Mrs. Barnard. "And that is that all such talk about equality, and this or that one being above or below, is nonsense with folk in our station of life. What does it matter if a girl's a parlour-maid or a lady's maid, or whether a man's a valet or a footman? They're servants, and just on the same level in the eyes of those that's above us all, just as I suppose the whole world's on a level to Royalties."

"I don't know about Royalties, but Edward's got to imagining that her ladyship's heard what he wants of me, and is putting me up to the idea that it ain't