"I see," mused Burgoyne, watching his cigarette smoke float lazily out the window.
"The usual thing. Father is impossible, but a good sort--mother is a pusher and, I dare say, fat--yes?--and daughter is not only a beauty but also something of a winner. Is she captured yet?"
"Not officially!" Pendleton answered; "but I understand that she is not without suitors," with a bit of a smile.
"With papa having the stuff! I reckon not, Malvolio," returned Burgoyne. "Give a woman money, and looks and some slight social position, and you can trust her for the rest--even if the boys are backward, which in this instance isn't likely."
"The Emersons are not the only 'new' ones the Club has admitted recently," Pendleton remarked.
"Not by several dozen, my friend!" exclaimed Devereux. "In ten years society will have passed from the control of those who are to those who weren't."
"Progress!" said Burgoyne. "The march of improvement for the bettering of the species. New blood--new blood!"
"Just so! Aristocracy of dollars is replacing aristocracy of birth," Pendleton commented. "It's the way of the world, since time began--money is the basis of our social structure, on it we stand, without it we fall."
"Doesn't culture count at all?" Devereux asked.
"Culture isn't considered in the first instance," Pendleton replied. "It's an asset but it isn't in the least essential. Riches with culture are desirable, but riches alone are sufficient. Culture is decreasing as riches increase."
"Just a trifle iconoclastic!" laughed Burgoyne. "You always were an idol breaker, Pendleton."
"Is this proof of it?" Pendleton asked, indicating those in the grill-room.
"Hum!--I reckon not," Burgoyne confessed, letting his eyes run over the crowd.
"Here are sixty or seventy of our _best_ people, and how many belonged two generations ago--or even one generation? You and Devereux and I, and a half dozen others perhaps. The rest were nobodies. Yet to-day they outnumber us ten to one.--They have bought their way into the old clubs--their children have bought their way into the exclusive dancing classes, their wives have bought their way through the fashionable charities into the fashionable cotillons. Money--money--money! Everything is money and money is everything. The golden key unlocks all doors."