Your father was a courageous pioneer.

All right-thinking men honor him." This, a fortnight after his return from Europe, from marrying Janet to Aristide, Viscount Brunais.

He had yielded to his secret snobbishness--Matilda thought it was her diplomacy--and had given Janet a dowry so extravagant that when old Saint Berthe heard the figures, he took advantage of the fact that only the family lawyer was present to permit a gleam of nature to show through his mask of elegant indifference to the "coarse side of life." Whitney had the American good sense to despise his wife, his daughter, and himself for the transaction.

For years furious had been his protestations to his family, to his acquaintances, and to himself against "society," and especially against the incursions of that "worm-eaten titled crowd from the other side." So often had he repeated those protests that certain phrases had become fixedly part of his conversation, to make the most noise when he was violently agitated, as do the dead leaves of a long-withered but still firmly attached bough.

Thus he was regarded in Chicago as an American of the old type; but being human, his strength had not been strong enough to resist the taint in the atmosphere he had breathed ever since he began to be very rich and to keep the company of the pretentious.