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 to think of other people's affairs." Slowly a smile crept over her face, from the rosy mouth up to the violet eyes. "Ah, wouldn't they like to know in the Town?" But her voice was bitter.

Ellen smiled again. "It makes no difference. They say what they want to believe anyway. . . . They said that I ran away with Clarence because I was going to have a baby . . . and I've never had it yet. It's been a long while coming."

"I wanted you to come . . . always, but I was too lazy ever to come to the point. You can stay as long as you like and do as you please. This is a big house. . . . You need never see the rest of us if you don't care to." She spoke with the carelessness of one who was fabulously rich; there was a certain medieval splendor in her generosity. Ellen smiled again.

"Why do you smile?" her cousin asked.

"I was thinking that all this money comes out of the Town . . . the same dirty old Town."

"There's satisfaction in that . . . to think that people like Judge Weissmann are paying us rent."

It was extraordinary how clearly the Town rose up before them. The thousands of miles which lay between made no difference. They belonged to the Town still, by a thousand ties. They were, each in her own way, American. All the years that Lily had lived in Paris could not alter the fact. She was extravagant as Americans are extravagant, content to live abroad forever as Americans are content to do. Yet all her wealth came out of America, out of the very factories in the dirty Town which they both despised. It was perhaps the Scotch blood in them that made them content wherever they saw fit to settle. In a strange country they would not, as the English do, strive to bring their native land with them; they would simply create a new world of their own. Their people have done it everywhere. . . in St. Petersburg, in Constantinople, in Paris, in the Argentine and on the frontiers of Africa.

"And your husband," began Lily. "Tell me about him. . . .