Half Loaves by Margaret Culkin Banning

There was a well-bred society in Carrington -- new perhaps in the sense that Carrington itself was young, but though the aggregate society might be new, most of its members were not novices in the enjoyment of beautiful things or in the traditions of manners. They came from a great many places in the United States, settling in Carrington for the "business reasons" of their sons or husbands or sons-in-law, and they went back whence they had come, on visits, establishing valuable rapports between the cities of their genesis and the one of their habitation. The women went to New York to shop, if their incomes were large enough, and, also, Carrington had its spring colony in California and its winter colony in Florida. All these interchanges were useful. They made of the mid-western city a place less provincial and less conglomerate. Carrington could indeed bear its social head with more pride and real distinction than many a larger place, overrun by parvenus. Bluffing was difficult. A newcomer always found persons who knew people of consequence in his former city, persons from his college who would easily place him. Yet, for all that, where bluffing was not involved to the point of being obnoxious, Carrington was tolerant and allowed the newcomer every chance to make good; was not too cruel in its comments, too exacting as to previous records. It had the laxities of the great world and many of the fine distinctions of the smaller worlds which revolve around the life of old cities. On the whole, a gracious place -- the kind of place that Europeans too rarely credit to the United States.

Cecily was high enough on the social ladder to be unconscious of any rungs to climb. And it had never been suggested at the Convent of the Sacred Heart that it was a modern and edifying pursuit to watch people swarming up from the ground and struggling to maintain a foothold on that ladder. So it never occurred to her that it meant a great deal to Fliss Horton to meet her, or that Fliss marked the day that she did meet her as a red-letter one of social success.