Carmelita had made few acquaintances among the people in the section of Long Island in which she lived who did not belong to Lucy Hodge's set. She had passed estates while motoring that fairly caught her breath with their well-kept beauty. The grounds around many of the castle-like houses were half a mile or more square in extent. Except for gardeners she had noticed few signs of life around them and she had often speculated as to what sort of people lived in these paradises which resembled in many respects her own father's establishment in the Argentine.
She had ventured to ask Lucy about this upon more than one occasion. Usually the latter passed her inquiry off with a sniff and a frivolous answer that meant nothing.
But once Lucy really took the trouble to explain, "Well, our crowd is fairly new to this section and I guess nobody can compare with us when good times are concerned. But there is an older society crowd here—stuffy old frumps for the most part who rather turn up their noses at us, I fancy, and think we're driv-
