Frock-coats and silk hats were objects seldom encountered in La
Chance, except in illustrations to magazine-stories, or in photographs
of life in New York or Washington. But of course, she reflected,
Colonel Fiske lived most of his life in Washington, about the
cosmopolitan delights of which he talked most eloquently to the two
ladies.
As was inevitable, Sylvia also met Eleanor Hubert more or less at Mrs.
Draper's. Sylvia had been rendered acutely self-conscious in that
direction by Mrs. Draper's very open comments on her role in the life
of the other girl, and at first had been so smitten by embarrassment
as positively to be awkward, a rare event in her life: but she was
soon set at ease by the other girl's gentle friendliness, so simple
and sincere that even Sylvia's suspicious vanity could not feel it
to be condescension. Eleanor's sweet eyes shone so kindly on her
successful rival, and she showed so frank and unenvious an
admiration of Sylvia's wit and learning, displayed perhaps a trifle
ostentatiously by that young lady in the ensuing conversation with
Mrs. Draper, that Sylvia had a fresh, healing impulse of shame for her
own recently acquired attitude of triumphing hostility towards the
world.
At the same time she felt a surprised contempt for the other girl's
ignorance and almost illiteracy. Whatever else Eleanor had learned in
the exclusive and expensive girls' school in New York, she had not
learned to hold her own in a conversation on the most ordinary topics;
and as for Mrs.
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